When I was a lad, the telephone was fixed to the wall in the kitchen, below the clock which regulated our lives.
This apparatus was an official-looking grey colour, its front featuring a rotating dial with which, once you got the knack of it, you could use your small fingers to enter the number you wanted to call.
I had one best friend, who lived a ten-minute bike ride away, so just the one number to remember, which was fortunate as there was no speed-dial or similar.
Balanced precariously on the top of the phone’s body was the handset. With a sizeable microphone at one end and a bulging loudspeaker at the other, it looked and felt rather like a double-headed grey plastic hammer.
The two parts were connected with a coiled grey cord, which could be extended quite a long way but would regularly end up in knots.
It was one of the questions from today’s new, free Italian exercise that conjured up this happy memory from the nineteen-seventies:
“Per cosa usi il tuo telefono?”
Duh… For calling people??
Or maybe I could take hold of the handset, with its tangled cord, stretch as far as the kitchen table, and use it for cracking open nuts, or crabs.
But what a stupid question that would have been!
Not these days, however. Though it still surprises me when, say during a discussion in class, a student will be using a smartphone or tablet to fact-check what’s being said, or to look up the meaning of a word.
Anyway, today I have another word order exercise for you, based on our native-speaker conversation ‘Tu e la tecnologia‘.
It’s easier than the last one as I’ve left the initial capitals and the final full-stops, which makes at least two of the choices straightforward.
Do give it a try.
You can do the exercise first and then the listening (if you haven’t already heard it.)
Or do the listening first, study the transcript, and THEN try the exercise.
Not all the text from the audio is used in the exercise, but much of it is, and it’s sequential, which should help.
So, here are those links again: EXERCISE | Listening/Tapescript
Oh and by the way, many thanks to John who suggested a way of fixing the ‘fat finger’ problem (the words to reorder were very close together.)
I modifed the code in accordance with his suggestion and all three exercises, including today’s, should now be easier to use.
Find them at the top of our ‘New’ page.
A mercoledì.
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Lynne F says
Thanks again Daniel, with sound track i am finding these exercises more useful. I too remember those old phones, apart from phone calls you could actually phone ‘TIM’ the talking clock to find the exact time. I would be lost now without my smartphone!