Today we will be looking at nine key words from the reading passage in Lesson 7 of KA’s Passages textbook.  The reading comes from a short story by Dorothy Parker entitled “The Standard of Living.”  Parker (1893–1967) was an American poet, critic, and short-story writer who wrote satirically about urban life in the first half of the 20th century.  She was as well known for her witty remarks and conversational skills as she was for her poetry and fiction.  For example, she once said, “I don’t care what is written about me as long as it isn’t true.”  In the 1940s and 1950s, Dorothy Parker worked as a scriptwriter in Hollywood, and two of her screenplays were nominated for Academy Awards.  She was also politically active, campaigning for civil rights and feminist causes.  “The Standard of Living” is the story of two rather silly young office workers named Annabel and Midge.  They dream of a better life filled with fame, fortune, and romance.  They spend all of their free time together, often playing a familiar old game, but with a new twist.

Many lovers of literature consider Anton Chekhov to be the greatest short-story writer of all time.  Born in Taganrog, Russia, in 1860, Chekhov studied medicine in university and became a respected practicing physician.  He began writing fiction in his spare time and produced hundreds of stories before his untimely death from tuberculosis at age 44 in 1904.  His stories deal with people from all walks of life and focus in on small, but significant moments in their lives.  The reading passage for this lesson and the nine vocabulary words we will be looking at today come from a story called “An Upheaval,” which Chekhov wrote in 1886.  The main character is a young girl named Mashenka who has just graduated from boarding school and is working as a live-in governess for a wealthy public official named Nikolay Sergeitch.  Coming home from a walk one day, Mashenka finds the house “in terrible turmoil.”  She goes to her room and is shocked to see her “mistress”—the lady of the house—going through her things.  The mistress leaves, and Liza, a housemaid, comes in.  Mashenka wants to know what this upheaval is all about.

9 key words from Taskmaster, Lesson 14 

We look at TEN great words from "The Man of the House" by Frank O'Conner.  Is it PLAUSIBLE that your English vocabulary will improve if you listen to WORDCAST?  You must first BELIEVE in yourself!  

The ELEVEN key words from this lesson were taken from a passage from The Watsons Go to Birmingham.

The year 1963 was a momentous one in American history.  In November, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.  Vice-President Lyndon Johnson took over, and the war in Vietnam began to escalate.  Earlier that year, in August, a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement had taken place—the March on Washington, D.C.  It was on that day that Dr. Martin Luther King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in which he talked about a future time when black Americans would be free, and people of all races and colors would live together in peace and harmony.  But just a few days later, in Birmingham, Alabama, the white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan bombed an African-American church, killing four young girls.  The last half of the The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963 centers around this incident.  In this passage, Kenny describes what it was like to be in Birmingham on that morning.  By the way, when the bomb exploded, everyone in Kenny’s family was sure that Kenny’s sister Joey was in that church.  

For this lesson, we will look at nine words from a  reading passages from an award-winning novel for young people, The Watsons Go to Birmingham, which was written by Christopher Paul Curtis.  The Watsons are an ordinary, but slightly offbeat, black family from Flint, Michigan.  The story is narrated by Kenny Watson, a bright, sensitive ten-year-old with a “lazy eye.”   Kenny’s thirteen-year-old brother Byron is an “official juvenile delinquent” who is constantly getting into trouble, which forces his parents to take drastic action.  They decide to drive to Birmingham, Alabama, and to leave Byron with Mrs. Watson’s mother for the summer vacation in the hope that staying there for a while away from his old friends and bad influences will straighten Byron out.  But the time is 1963. Birmingham is in the heart of America’s racially divided Deep South, and it is there that the narrator Kenny learns how dangerous and ugly the world can be.  In today’s reading, however, Kenny recalls a time when a teacher asked him to show off his advanced reading skills to a class of fifth-graders.  Kenny, by the way, was only in the second grade, and Byron, his big brother, was in the class!

The eight key words in today’s lesson come from the same passage in Walk Two Moons, Sharon Creech’s novel for young people, as that used in the last lesson.  Sal, the thirteen-year-old heroine, has driven a car out to the site of an accident where, a year earlier, a bus slid off the road, crashed through a guardrail, and plummeted down a steep hill, killing everyone on board except one person.  Sal climbs down to check the bus out, looking for clues that might tell her what has happened to her missing mother.  All the key words, by the way, are short, simple verbs and adjectives (and we’ve included lots of common expressions and phrasal verbs based on them) that describe everyday actions—words that, once mastered, you should be able to put to good use in your own descriptive writing.

In today's lesson, we will look at nine key words from the reading passage in Passages, Lesson 2.  To listen to a recording of the passage, please tune in to the KA Voicecast website.  

Welcome to the new season of KA WORDCAST.  For the next 25 lessons, we will cover key vocabulary words from the Passages textbook.  In this lesson, we will examine nine words from a passage taken from a book titled Walk Two Moons. 

This is our final Taskmaster lesson.  KA WORDCAST will return on Tuesday, August 19 with more challenging words from PASSAGES.