Anna and the fighter is a book from Elizabeth Laird. This book belongs to Heinemann Guided Readers series that was published at five levels with simple stories that can help beginners to improve their English learning.

            This book tells Anna’s story, a girl who lived in a village with her father. She was going alone in a train for the first time to visit her aunt in Naira. Inside the train, Anna met a strange man called Sam that she thought he was a criminal. However, after he helped her, Anna realized that Sam was a famous boxer and they became friends.

            It is a good book for beginners because there aren’t many characters and there are some pictures that can help reader to identify the story. The vocabulary is also a good point: there are about 600 basic words, so students are able to read and to understand.

            At the same time, the theme of the book it isn’t interesting. This kind of book needs to be attractive for those who read it. The topic should be more convenient with the reality of the readers. However, if the reader is not interested in the story but only in the vocabulary and structures, it is a good book to begin.

      

    The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain

          The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain is a movie by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and it was considered one of the best of 2001. It seems like a fairytale especially because of the places and the characters that, as a good European movie, are very important in the story.

          This comedy is about Amélie Poulain, a young woman who was a very lonely child and didn’t have any friends. Her father was a doctor and he thought she had a serious disease that prevented her to attend school. For this reason her mother, that was as neurotic as her father, taught her at home. When Amélie grown up, she decided to live by herself and she started to work as a waitress in a café.

          The day of Princess Diana’s death was the date that changed Amélie’s life. That day, she found an old box hidden in her apartment that belonged to the person who lived there before her. The box was full of old toys and things that someone maybe could consider a treasure. Amélie started to get curious about it and what this box could mean for someone. Then, she started looking for this person and when she returned the box to its owner and saw that it makes him very happy, she realized that small deeds can have a big impact on people’s lives. After this, Amélie decided to help people, but she was so stuck in her own world that she couldn’t show herself, so she created funny situations to help people without they know that she was doing this.

          However, one day Amélie meet a man that made her fell in love. It was a problem because she needed to go out of her world to get her own happiness. This walking until Amélie get free of her shame is a beautiful lesson about values and dreams. It is a story that you want to see one, two, three times and you’ll always learn something because it is a human story.

Victims of prejudice

Many groups of people have been victims of prejudice. They have suffered with prejudice because of their way of life or because of their choices.

Men are victims of prejudice in many situations. Men who like dancing, for example, are called homosexual because our society doesn’t realize that dance is not just for women.

Everybody has heard about prejudice about black people, but there’s a prejudice about people who have blond hair as well. Those people are called silly and not intelligent because of our culture that created this point of view based on movies, for example.

Even in academic circle we can find prejudice, especially when we talk about courses. Letters and Arts are areas that most of people consider useless because they focus creativity and human formation. What’s more, people usually think that these courses don’t offer good opportunities of job.

Many people have given up of their goals because of the psychological   pressure that prejudice causes. I wonder how many people have lost a lot of opportunities because of it. Prejudice is a way to deny that people make their dreams come true. We have to respect people’s choices and live our lives without worrying about common sense that human being has kept. This is freedom.

Walking and health

A recently research showed how exercises are important not only for health body but also to increase self confidence and reduce anxiety. Most of people complain about don’t have time to do exercises or don’t have money to pay for a good fitness center. However, we can develop healthy and simple habits that can improve our lives.  

A habit that is very common and efficient is walking, indeed in USA walking is the most popular fitness activity. Japanese researchers tested obese men before and after they started a walking program that lasted one year. They proved that a walking from the car to the grocery store can improve blood pressure and cholesterol levels.

There are more good news about this research: the result also shows that the amount of body fat around the abdomen, that is the dangerous kind of fat that causes heart diseases and diabetes, significantly decreased thanks to this walking program. It interesting to say that this program is based on daily activities, so walking is maybe the easiest form of exercise to maintain.

Certainly, walking, as all of kind of exercises, need to become a habit for those who practice it. When it become something natural, the results appear. It is easy to keep healthy, it is just to start!

Our first sport

Unlike people think, football wasn’t the first modern sport practiced in Brazil. In 1810 turfe (a kind of horse race) started to be practiced by English in Rio de Janeiro. It was our first modern sport.

For 47 years, Derby Club was the place where people practiced turfe, but this place doesn’t exist anymore. Maracanã stadium was built there. Turfe was more than a sport: it was a social event just for rich people. It comes from that time the habit that women had of wearing big and extravagant hats just to attract attention.

Our second important modern sport in the 19^TH century was rowing. It was permitted just when the aesthetic patterns of Brazilian people accepted that kind of clothing. They considered that people who practiced rowing were almost naked. Football, the sport that we consider the most famous in Brazil, was played for the first time in 1895 in São Paulo, 85 years after turfe appeared.

These sports show a little bit of our history and how we were influenced by European culture. We can learn more about our own culture if we look for the history of some sports.

Going to the college

Sophie is a young college student. She is in her first year of English Course and everything is new for her. She always had a dream: to be an English Teacher. When she was a little child she used to call all the neighborhood’s kids to play with her and she pretended to be the teacher and the kids were the students. Now, the dream has started to come true.

Going to the college, Sophie started to imagine how many things she will learn and how many new people she will know. She knows that is the first week of the school year and everybody is excited, but she intends to concentrate on her goal and let things happen.

When she got in the college she felt very anxious. Then, she breathed deeply and went ahead. She wanted to visit the library, so she started to get some information because it was a huge place.

She easily found the library. Inside there, she sat and got looking around, wondering “God, this is the heaven!” She never had seen so many books together!

It was almost lunch time and Sophie was still in the library when she decided to go to the class. Then, she stood up and when she started walking, she bumped to a bookcase. It was a legend scene. The bookcase was so fragile, because it was very old, that it fell down and she could see all the books on the floor. Everybody was in shock because of the noise.

Sophie got very embarrassed, but she knew that it was just an accident. Now, she really started doing her history: the girl who shacked the college library.