W 24 - Int 2

Week 24 - Intermediate 2 – Party

I)            Reading

1) Think of a festival you know or have heard about. How much do you know about it?

a). What is the name of the festival?

b) When does it take place?

c) How long does it go on for?

d) What do you know about its history?

e) How do people celebrate?

f) How does the festival end?

2) Read this article about a big Spanish festival: Las Fallas

It’s March, and I’m in Valencia, Spain’s third largest city, with my new friend, José. It’s one o’clock in the morning. All around us, fireworks are going off and the streets are full of noisy people. ‘Welcome to Las Fallas,’ José smiles. ‘You’re going to see that Valencians really know how to put on a good party!’ Seven hours later, I understood what he meant.

Las Fallas, Valencia’s famous festival, takes place every March and goes on for a week. It takes a whole year to organise, and everybody joins in the preparations. The city is alive and buzzing all week, but, like all good parties, it is at night when people really get doan to someone serious celebrating.

The tradition of Las Fallas began in the eighteenth century. At that time, craftsmen used wooden candelabra to light up their workshops. To celebrate the end of winter, they burnt their candelabra on bonfires, and had a party. Later they made the candelabra into life like statues, and then dressed them up to look like well-known but unpopular local characters.

Nowadays the lifelike statues are made of cardboard. Some of them are over thirty metres high and are worth 200,000 euros, but they all go up in flames before the end of the festival.

The Valencians like their guests to enjoy themselves, but after only one hour’s sleep it’s difficult to keep up with them. Nobody’s allowed to sleep during Las Fallas! A brass band passes through the streets in the morning and wakes everybody up.

For many of the locals, the highlight of the festivals is the flower parade. A procession of 200,000 girls and boys, wearing traditional dress, march into the city centre, bringing flowers to decorate the statue of the Virgin Mary.

The festival reaches its climax on 19^th March, a public holiday and St Joseph’s Day. This is the night when the cardboard statues are burnt. Everybody looks forward to midnight. Firecrackers go off every second or two, and midnight passes in a shower of explosions. The last statue burns down, and the party is over. Well, almost… the bars fill up and people carry on eating and drinking until the early hours of the morning. I have no idea how they keep it up! So I say goodbye to José, as he heads for the next bar. It will take me weeks to get over it, but I’ve had the time of my life.

3) Find answers to the questions above.

II)         Vocabulary:

1)   Complete this description of Las Fallas with the following words

bonfires               festival                  firecrackers               fireworks      parade       procession               statues            traditional dress

Las Fallas takes place in March and goes on for a week. The main feature of the

_____________ is the enormous lifelike _________ which are burnt in huge __________ on the last day. The incredibly loud ____________ that go off every lunchtime in the city centre make Las Fallas the noisiest festival in the world. There is also a spectacular display of _____________ in the park at midnight. One of the highlights of the festival is the ____________ of girls and boys in ________ . They ____________________ through the city centre, bringing flowers for the Virgin Mary.

2)   Match the phrasal verbs in the table to one of the following word or phrase with the same meaning

anticipate            excitedly              continue at the same speed       destroy with fire

explode           organise       participate          put special clothes on     recover    start

intransitive	transitive
	separable	not separable
go off join in burn down	put something on dress something up keep something up	get down to something look forward to something get over something

3) Which of these sentences is grammatically incorrect? Cross it out.

a) You can look the word up in a dictionary.

b) You can look it up in a dictionary.

c) You can look up the word in a dictionary.

d) You can look up it in a dictionary.

III)       Homework:

Write a short summary of a festival you know about.

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