Professional Documents
Culture Documents
September 2010
Level ≥ Lower intermediate
Style ≥ Lesson plan
Welcome to the Guardian Weekly’s special news-based materials to support learners and teachers of English.
Each month, the Guardian Weekly newspaper selects topical news articles that can be used to practise English
language skills. The materials are graded for two levels: advanced and lower intermediate. These worksheets
can be downloaded free from guardian.co.uk/weekly/. You can also find more advice for teachers and learn-
ers from the Guardian Weekly’s Learning English section on the site.
Instructions
Lesson focus: reading, note taking, discussion
Materials: dictionaries
Time: 55 minutes
September 2010
Student tasks 4 Rio’s education secretary, Claudia Costin, said authorities were
considering a number of things to improve security, including
1 Read the first three paragraphs of the article and make bulletproofing.
notes under the following headings.
Crime:
5 “I will talk to the school’s staff to see if this [bulletproofing]
Victim:
might be useful,” Costin said. “If they think it is a good idea, yes,
When it happened:
we will do it.”
Location:
Details of crime:
6 Although politicians have praised a new “pacification” plan,
which has driven drug gangs from 11 shanty towns, most
of Rio’s 1,000 slums are still controlled by armed gangs and
2 Read the whole article and answer these questions. vigilante groups.
a What are the authorities planning to do to the schools?
7 Edna Felix, a director of Rio’s teachers’ union, said many
schools urgently needed bulletproofing and asked for “the
b How many young people are in schools in the immediate end to police operations during school hours”.
dangerous slums?
8 “When there is a confrontation, as soon as we hear the first shot,
we have to leave the classroom, run to the corridor, duck, try
c Who controls most of Rio’s slums? and get the children out of the way,” said Felix, a primary school
teacher in the notorious Morro dos Macacos slum.
d What does Edna Felix want the police to stop doing? 9 “The kids get very scared, they cry. It’s not just the fear of what
might happen to them inside the school but also because they
have family members outside in the community.”
e What do the teachers do when there is a confrontation?
Original article by Tom Phillips, rewritten by
Janet Hardy-Gould