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COVID-19 Pandemic

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Activities

Think about the following questions and take some notes

  1. What do you know about COVID-19 and its effect on the aviation industry?
  2. How has it affected you and your work / personal life? What has changed?
  3. What do you think will happen in the future?

Watch the video

Watch the video below and answer the following questions.

  1. What global consequence is the journalist talking about for aviation?
  2. What obligation for some airlines does he mention?
COVID-19 Pandemic

Help: If you found the listening too difficult you can read the text below.

Click to read text

One of the worst of what we’re seeing yet… at least for aviation and airlines are in the the process of completely closing down. Some of them until further notice not even outlining a timescale and that’s because of a variety of things. On one side it’s because of this falling demand… so air travel demand right now has fallen to is lowest levels in aviation history, let’s be clear… this is the largest crisis to ever hit the aviation industry and so as a result… because airlines cannot fly passengers because of the global restrictions those planes are empty and an airline can only ever make money when an aircraft is in the air with passengers… so given that’s not the case we are now seeing this wave come from Asia and work its way through to Europe, even here in the Middle East as you mentioned the United Arab Emirates have issued a directive to state that their airlines must close down at least for two weeks… why is that significant, well the UAE is home to Dubai and Abu Dhabi, two global gateways, with Emirates and Etihad operating. These airlines will be shut down as from Wednesday, along with Fly Dubai and Air Arabia. That cuts a lot of worldwide travel and we are seeing this replicate now not just from Asia but even in Europe where later this week airline giants including Easyjet will ground the overwhelming majority of their fleet.
Alexa talk us through the economic impact here….

Language Focus

  1. What verb does the journalist use to talk about the obligation to airlines?
  2. What other verbs do you know to talk about different kinds of obligations?
    • Make a list of these verb forms and then write some sentences to talk about different kinds of obligations you have in your work and personal life.
  3. What words are used to talk about the reason for something?
  4. What words are used to talk about the effect of something?

These words to talk about ‘the reason for something’ and ‘the effect of something’ are commonly used ‘connecting’ words. They help the listening to understand the connection between the previous information and the next bit of information. Try to write some of your own sentences in relation to the reason for things and the effect of certain actions / situations.

Speaking

Look at the notes you took and thing about what the journalist in the video said. Record yourself speaking about COVID-19 and its effects. Try to use the obligation words you noticed above. Also try to use the ‘connecting’ words too. Listen to your recording and try to correct any mistakes you hear, after that record your audio again.

Follow-up activities

You can find more information about the COVID-19 pandemic on the Guardian UK‘s website and follow live updates from the New York Times.

Vocabulary

To study some vocabulary related to COVID-19 click here.