1. Provide a synonym & opposite of the words underlined in yellow.

Then, produce
a contextualized example.
2. Provide an explanation as instructed on the footnotes (fuchsia underlining).

My £8 salad and detox juice

won’t save the planet — but
the next generation of
schoolkids might
Two slices of springy Mother’s Pride, bright pink ham and lashings
of piccalilli, cut into perfect squares, and wrapped in tin foil: John’s
wet-break sandwiches of 1995 have a lot to answer for. Comparing
my classmates’ gloriously neat packed lunch with my damp cheese
sandwich was when I realised that more than football teams, more
than accents, more than the shoes you wear, the social semaphore of
what we stuff our faces with begins in the school canteen at lunch, and
ekes its way on to the office desk, informing our relationship with food
and each other forever.

School packed lunches are properly political. Indulge my sweeping

generalisations for a moment: Working class? White bread. Middle class?
Wholemeal. Parents are hippies? Flora. Parents are builders? Real butter.
A packet of crisps and a Club biscuit? The envy of Year Seven in its
entirety.

Fast forward to your desk, and what is your collegue eating? Do you judge
him for it? He’s bought a packed lunch — he must be organised and thrifty
(probably a bit uptight). Whole Foods sushi? She’s ridiculous and
extravagant. Brexiteer? A pasty. Remainer? Leon.
I still have the subconscious flaw that I should treat myself to a posh lunch
on a daily basis. I think nothing of going to Pure (my favourite lunchtime
food chain) for an £8 serving of wealth and ambition in a recycled plastic
salad bowl. I always opt for the “Mexican”, and on detox day I go to
Whole Foods for a green juice that tastes like Swampy’s bathwater for a
price so exorbitant that I’m embarrassed to reveal it here.

I think nothing of it. It’s a savage indictment of a mindless society, the

way in which at 1pm the streets fill with wide-eyed Londoners searching
for something tasty to squander their wages on. There are those legends
among us who bring leftovers to the office instead — leftovers accounted
for the contents of 157 million lunchboxes last year, up 20 million on the
previous 12 months, says data1 firm Kantar. It’s a no-brainer — if we are
lucky enough to own a working oven and fridge, and to be able to afford
things to put in them, why are we being so wanton?

And what about the waste that comes with the lunches we buy — the box,
the lid, cutlery, the napkin, the sauce sachet2, the bag, the receipt — all of
which goes in the bin, hopefully to be recycled?

The remedy to all this, though, is not creating so much waste in the first
place. The work that Grow has been doing lately is outstanding — Grow
is an education programme that is on a mission to change our relationship
with food, the land and each other, and it is fundraising to transform a field
next to Totteridge Academy in Barnet.

The plan is to grow fresh food to serve in the school canteen. Hopefully
the next generation of lunching Londoners won’t be as wasteful as we are.

1
EXPLAIN THE NOTION OF NOUNS WITH EQUIVOCAL NUMBER AND PROVIDE MORE EXAMPLES
2
PROVIDE A PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION
You give birth to your first son, and behind the haze of joy, the fog of love
and magic there is a background noise, a nagging, a pressure to show your
baby to the world.

But it’s not just the in-laws outstaying their welcome over cake and coffee.
Everyone is baying for a photo of your sweet, venerable new child. A
glimpse of his face is what they want before you’ve even begun to
recognise him yourself. As his mother you see fit to share a picture of his
hands on Instagram — that’s not enough to quench their thirst to identify
your baby as their own.

Then comes the christening. You want to bless your baby in the eyes of
your chosen god. The ceremony, his baby tears and smiles — they want
to judge those, and what you’re wearing, and how fat you got, how thin
you are now. They want to decipher what your dress says about the type
of mother you are.

Your maternal desire to protect him is fierce but they are taxpayers who
funded your renovations so they own your baby now, too. I’m a taxpayer,
and my neighbour lives in a council house next door. Her boiler broke
down recently and the repairs were paid for by the council, and by taxes.
She gave birth to her son the same month as Archie Harrison
Mountbatten-Windsor was born, at the NHS hospital down the road.

My taxes paid for that too. But he’s not my baby, he’s hers — and if I
harassed her for a picture of him and access to his christening, the police
would have something to say. Can we get a grip, show a bit more class
and mind our own business?

*To the Highlands for a beautiful wedding, where a guest told me I was
“objectively beautiful”. I was so confused by this that I had to Google it
the morning after.
I said thank you because it sounded like a lovely thing to be called, and it
turns out that it was. The guest was young and female and she didn’t need
to make me feel good but she went out of her way to do so. Compliments
are so easy to give, why don’t we just dish them out daily?