Upgrade Your Spanish

187 Pages·2001·1.42 MB·English

by  Abigail Lee Six

Upgrade
your Spanish
This page intentionally left blank
Upgrade
your Spanish
Abigail Lee Six
ROYAL HOLLOWAY
UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
HODDER
EDUCATION
AN HACHETTE UK COMPANY
First published in Great Britain in 2001 by
Arnold, an imprint of Hodder Education,
an Hachette UK Company,
338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH
http://www.hoddereducation.com
© 2001 Abigail Lee Six
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically,
including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval
system, without either prior permission in writing from the publisher or a
licence permitting restricted copying. In the United Kingdom such licences
are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency: 90 Tottenham court Road,
London W1P 0LP.
The advice and information in this book are believed to be true and
accurate at the date of going to press, but neither the author[s] nor the
publisher can accept any legal responsibility of liability for any errors or
omissions.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library-of-Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
978 0 340 76186 1
4 5678910
Production Editor: Anke Ueberberg
Production Controller: Martin Kerans
Cover Design: Terry Griffiths
Illustrations: Colin Wheeler (chapter openers), Gejo Casanovas (illustrations)
Typeset in Formata by J&L Composition Ltd, Filey, North Yorkshire
Printed and bound in India for Hodder Education, an Hachette UK
Company
What do you think about this book? Or any other Hodder Education title?
Please visit our website: www.hoddereducation.com
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction vii
Day 1: Agreements 1
Day 2: Describing People 7
Day 3: Easy Subjunctive Constructions 13
Day 4: Accents, Part I 17
Day 5: Politics and Current Affairs 21
Day 6: Regular Verbs 25
Day 7: Visual Arts 31
Day 8: Accents, Part II 37
Day 9: Literature 43
Day 10: Ser and Estar 51
Day 11: Geography 57
Day 12: Time 63
Day 13: Rhetorical Signposts 69
Day 14: History 75
Day 15: Radical-changing Verbs 79
Day 16: Music 85
Day 17: Dependent Prepositions 91
Day 18: Cinema 97
Day 19: Irregular Verbs 101
Day 20: Education 111
Day 21: Conditional Sentences 117
Day 22: Health 123
Day 23: Dialogue 127
Day 24: Spelling Changes 133
Day 25: Science 137
Day 26: Imperatives 143
Day 27: Similes and Set Expressions 149
Day 28: Minor Points 153
Day 29: Vocabulary Test 159
Day 30: Grammar Test 161
Progress Chart 164
Answers to Exercises 165
Index 177
Acknowledgements
I should like to thank my former and present institutions, Queen Mary & Westfield College
and Royal Holloway, for granting me sabbatical leave to write Upgrade. I am grateful to my
students for their willingness to be guinea-pigs when I was trying out different learning and
revision strategies. Finally, I thank my two young sons, for the hours they let me spend at
my desk instead of being with them.
Abigail Lee Six
Introduction
Upgrade is a thirty-day home revision and consolidation programme for Spanish language
students at all levels from the sixth form to the final year of university or college. If you are
not confident of getting an 'A' grade in your Spanish language examinations, this book can
help you. Bearing in mind that you will have other subjects to revise in the vacation prior
to your examinations, each day's exercises are designed to take between half an hour and
one hour to complete. If you work through Upgrade seriously, you can improve your grade,
so, for example, if you are likely to get a C without using the book, you can expect at least
a B by studying it conscientiously.
AIMS OF THE BOOK
At this late stage, and working on your own, it is unrealistic to expect yourself for the first
time to master the most complex and subtle aspects of the Spanish language; whatever
progress you were going to make on those fronts has already been achieved. So, fascin-
ating as these aspects are, Upgrade steers clear of them and focuses instead on th
basics at the expense of the finer distinctions and the juicier exceptions to each rule.
This book does not aim to cover everything - a reference grammar and a dictionary
serve that purpose - but instead to focus on three key areas where you can make a real
difference in this last month:
- eliminating basic errors and slips of the pen;
- expanding and consolidating your vocabulary;
- injecting some sophistication into the style of your Spanish.
Keeping concentration at the optimum level is a major concern during uninterrupted
hours of home revision. With this in mind and because you have dictionaries and
reference grammars for systematic and ordered information, Upgrade may seem oddly
random to you in its structure. Vocabulary is not in alphabetical order and grammar rules
are covered only as and when they are thought to be of value to you, on your own, at
the eleventh hour. The sections alternate between grammar and vocabulary, with style
sections placed at longer intervals. All these varied and apparently random qualities are
intended to keep you awake! But if you prefer to copy information into your own notes
ordered differently, that in itself will be a good learning strategy. However, the daily
exercises are designed to consolidate and build on work covered on previous days, so
you should follow the order of the book to obtain the best results from it.
GETTING THE MOST FROM THIS BOOK
Different students will find different days harder than others, so don't be surprised if you
can get a top score relatively effortlessly on one day, while another is a battle. This is
simply because people's strengths and weaknesses differ. Remember that you are not
VIII UPGRADE YOUR SPANISH
wasting your time if you find certain exercises easy: you are consolidating, building
confidence and learning where your particular strengths lie, all of which are very
important aspects of preparation for examinations.
If you complete the exercises for one day in under half an hour, it is advisable not to
go straight on to the next day's section. Do some language revision of your own (for
example, past papers or your own vocabulary lists and notes) to make up the time you
have allotted to language work, and come back to Upgrade tomorrow. On the other
hand, if you find that you have not finished a particular day's exercises after about half
an hour, it is best to stop anyway and come back to it later on, when you will have a
new lease of concentration. Doggedly plodding on past saturation point is not the best
way to achievement. So switch to another type of revision altogether and leave language
work for at least an hour. You may like to work in pencil so that if you do find the
exercises for a certain day particularly difficult, you can rub your answers out and try it all
over again after an interval.
HOW THE EXERCISES WORK
The daily exercises carry 30 points each, numbered 1-30 with arabic numerals. All other
sequences are numbered using roman numerals.
Where an exercise consists of filling gaps with Spanish words, the number of letters
for each word you are looking for is shown by the number of blanks, thus: for a
three-lettered word, for example. Where you are being asked to provide English words, a
dotted line will be used, thus: , with no indication of word-lengths.
A sound will be presented within oblique strokes, thus: /g/. A letter of the alphabet,
by contrast, will be in bold type, thus: g. Where the stressed vowel in a word needs to be
shown, it will be underlined, thus: Isabel.
Use the answer section to mark your own work and then put each day's score on the
progress chart at the end of the book.
(cid:1)(cid:1)
DDAAYY
NNeevveerr ffoorrggeett aannootthheerr aaggrreeeemmeenntt!! 11
Do you ever forget to make your adjectives agree? Most students do.
Here are some exercises to help you remember without fail, and some to
give you practice at checking your work effectively by training your eye to
spot forgotten agreements.
AGREEMENTS FOR GENDER
Not all adjectives have a different form for masculine and feminine. Here
is a basic list of the ones that do:
(cid:1)Those that end in -oin the masculine change to -ain the feminine, e.g. bonito[pretty]
becomesbonita.
(cid:1)Those that end in -dorin the masculine change to -dorain the feminine, e.g. hablador
[talkative] becomes habladora.
(cid:1)Those that end in -án, -ín, -ónor -ésin the masculine, change to -ana, -ina, -ona, -esa
in the feminine (NB: no accent in the feminine endings), e.g. holgazán[lazy] becomes
holgazana, pequeñín [tiny] becomes pequeñina, besucón [liking to kiss] becomes
besucona, and francés[French] becomes francesa.
Add the correct ending to the following:
1 ¡No seas tont_, María! 3
¡Camarero!
Don’t be silly, María! ¡Mi sopa está
fri_!
2 Teresa es gorda porque es tan
comil_ _ _.
Teresa is fat because she is so greedy.
4 Pilar es muy parlanch_ _ _.
Pilar is a real chatterbox. Waiter! My soup is cold!
AGREEMENTS FOR NUMBER
The basic rule is that adjectives ending in a vowel add s; adjectives ending in a consonant
add -es. If there is a written accent on the last syllable of the adjective, remember that it will
often lose it when you pluralize because you will have added a syllable to the end of the
word (e.g. inglésbecomesingleses). Don’t touch an accent anywhere else, though. Stress
rules will be covered more thoroughly on Day 8. Adjectives ending in zwill change it to c
before adding es(e.g.voraz[voracious] becomes voraces), but you will have a chance to
think about spelling changes like this again on Day 24.