That's English! - Module 5 - unit 7: Cooking

Food and cooking are becoming more and more popular so it's a very common topic not only in Spain but in UK as well. This lesson deals with this so let's start with general questions and then we'll work with the specific points, especially about grammar.

General questions

• Can you cook well? What's your favourite dish and how do you make it?
• Have you ever been to a Chinese/Thai/Indian/Greek restaurant? What was it like? Did you enjoy the food? Why/why not?
• What do you think about American food? Have you ever been to a Tex-Mex restaurant?
• Do you know anything about the Mediterranean diet? Do you eat it? Why/why not?
• Have you ever been on a diet? What was the experience like? Did you lose weight?

Grammar: quantifiers

If you want a further explanation about this grammar point, you can go to this link with a lot of examples; click here

If you want to practise with these quantifiers you can use these pages or exercises:

• a list of exercises, click here  or choose these  exercise 1    exercise 2

As a summary, here you are a diagram to deal with quantifiers:

UNCOUNTABLE* (+ singular)	COUNTABLE* (+ plural)
Some any no (a) little (not) much too much how much	Some any no (a) few (not) many too many how many

* I prefer using singular and plural to avoid problems such as coffee or coffees.  You have this sentence using both:  How much coffee do you drink?  ---- Too much, I think. I drink many coffees at work but I don't drink any in the evening. 

Grammar: giving advice (SHOULD/OUGHT TO/HAD BETTER)

These modal forms are used when you want to give advice or for strong recommendations. If you want to see the difference between these forms, you could go to this video with an explanation or go to this one for more examples. But if you need just an introduction about these modals, go to this link which also has examples and exercises.

Remember that when you use them you must be careful with the following verbal form, like in these examples:

• SHOULD+INFINITIVE     If you want to lose weight you should eat less fat food
• OUGHT TO+INFINITIVE    She ought to be careful with that knife
• HAD BETTER+INFINITIVE    You'd better stay in bed if you don't feel well

But another form which is also used and it's not in your textbook is If I were you I wouldn't do it; remember the use of second or hypothetical conditional. The example is similar in meaning to You'd better not do it but this sounds a bit stronger than the conditional.

ORAL PRACTICE

• Think of a recipe and explain it
• I like/don't like cooking because...  (time / cleaning / shopping / my mum's cooking...)
• ADVISE about: to do exercise, to buy a new telephone, to have a cold, to lose weight, to study a degree, to save money, to go on holiday...)

Here you are some exercises to practise with: exercise 1     exercise 2     exercise 3 : this is the one we did in class all together.