News for Discussion

Why putting on weight has become a problem around the world.

George Monbiot: Why is Top Gear apparently exempt from the BBC's editorial guidelines and the duty not to fake the facts?

http://www.engvid.com/ Learn how to use the news to learn English. Improve your vocabulary and comprehension by listening to the news on TV and radio, or rea...

With rules obliging migrants to speak English being fought out in the courts and with cuts to the provision of English as a second language coming into force this week: we ask if the government should be forcing people to speak English...

The growth of high speed broadband and increasingly sophisticated games in South Korea has led to a rise in young people who have become addicted to the web.

This lesson looks at skimming – the ability to read a text quickly and understand what the general meaning is. I suggest one way to practise your skimming skills. It is a good place to start if you find you can’t read texts quickly enough and don’t like skimming and so only scan for “key words” in the text. It may help that the practice idea is really half scanning and half skimming. After a skimming exercise, there is a sample reading text with 5 true/false/not given questions.

Tanning gets so much bad press we risk losing sight of the facts. Jane Feinmann asks: is it time we stopped being so scared of the sun?

This is the VOA Special English Technology Report, from http://voaspecialenglish.com | http://facebook.com/voalearningenglish The World Health Organization h...

This is the VOA Special English Education Report, from http://voaspecialenglish.com | http://facebook.com/voalearningenglish More than forty of the fifty Ame...

This is the VOA Special English Education Report, from http://voaspecialenglish.com | http://facebook.com/voalearningenglish What American students are expec...

The leader of a head teachers' union blames poor parenting and a culture of consumerism and celebrity for young people rioting and looting.

This cartoon by Andy Davey from The Sun relates to research that shows that smartphones have turned Britain into a nation of mobile addicts. Regulator Ofcom found that 60 per cent of teenagers and more than a third of adults...

One in three adults in the UK now use a smartphone, according to research by the telecoms regulator Ofcom.

This is the VOA Special English Health Report , from http://voaspecialenglish.com | http://facebook.com/voalearningenglish Americans spend more on health car...

Just one in 13 older girls are getting their recommended five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, official government data shows.