Given my proclivity to criticise
standards of spoken English and to reminisce about the Universities’ Test of
English taken by students applying for a university place in the 1960s, I
thought I’d look at what was being tested in the SATs tests in England and Wales.
I did a short sample paper entitled: “KS2 English Tests - Spelling, Grammar and
Punctuation - level 3-5, Short”, which happened to be the grammatical section.
This test is the Standard Assessment Test used in the National Curriculum. It covers
the period from age 7 to 11 in junior school.
I must say that I found the
questions far more taxing than I anticipated. This is, in my opinion, a very
good standard indeed to face at age 11. I hope English teaching maintains the
same high standards throughout secondary education. Here are the questions:
.What does the word others refer to in the passage
below?
.Tick one box to show how the modal verb affects the meaning
of the sentence.
.Find the adverb in the sentence below.
.In this sentence, is the word after being used as a
subordinating conjunction or as a preposition?
.Which sentence uses the past progressive?
.Tick the option that shows how the underlined words are
used in the sentence. (My baby brother was born in the hospital where my
father works.)
.Tick all the sentences that contain a preposition.
.Tick all the determiners in the sentence below.
The UEFA Euro 2016 football championship
begins in France on June 10th. At the moment, France is still in
turmoil owing to the continuing labour disputes between unions and the
government about changes to employment law which have recently been forced
through the National Assembly without a vote. Will the Euro have to be
cancelled? Good question. In an editorial in Le Figaro on 27th May, a number of
points were made. Public sector workers work fewer hours than the private
sector. A good percentage work less than the official 35 hours. This has been
shown in numerous official reports over the years and nothing has ever been
done. The government has just voted an increase in public sector pay. How can
the national budget ever be balanced? Whose interests are best served by the
current social upheaval, by trying to stop all reform of employment law? Answer:
those who work less than the others, have a job for life and generous pensions.
These people fight tooth and nail for the status quo. The irony is that these
people are not in the least affected by the recent changes in employment law. It
affects the private sector.
The union which is leading the
fight is the Confédération Générale du
Travail (CGT). It is a left-wing union which goes back a long way (1895). It’s
something of a union dinosaur whose preferred method of negotiation is
conflict. In the current stand-off, union representatives can be heard claiming
legitimacy by saying that the majority of the French people support their
stance. According to the Le Monde newspaper, the CGT represents as at April
2016 less than 3% of French employees. Another major union, the Confédération française démocratique du
travail (CFDT), founded in 1919, is the largest in membership terms.
Nowadays, it is less conflictual than the CGT and is beginning to view labour
relations more in the British or German way, change through debate, discussion
and by offering alternative solutions to the resolving of disputes.
Membership of unions is nowadays
very low, which leads to the question of how they are financed. Union finances
in France are opaque, not to say a bit of a mystery. More on this next time.
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