Vocabulary: crime and punishment

Today we are going to have a look at the vocabulary related to justice: crimes, criminals and how they are punished.

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First of all, this Prezi presentation will show us the most important terms and then we'll look into the ones that need further explanation.


As you can see, many names of criminals derive from the crime words, or the other way around. There are also verbs associated with them:

CRIME	CRIMINAL	VERB
burglary	burglar	burgle
robbery	robber	rob
murder	murderer	murder
mugging	mugger	mug
kidnapping	kidnapper	kidnap
smuggling	smuggler	smuggle
bribery	briber	bribe
shoplifting	shoplifter	shoplift
pickpocketing	pickpocket	pickpocket
forgery	forger	forge

For the difference between rob and steal, have a look at this blog post.

Murderer and killer both mean "someone who deliberately kills a person". A serial killer (but not *serial murderer) is someone who has killed a number of people over a period of time, usually in the same fashion. An assassin, on the other hand, is someone who kills an important or famous person for money or political reasons.

In the next 80s song by Bananarama we can hear a few expressions related to the topic we are dealing with today.



Finally, let's do some exercises:

• Types of crimes
• Choose the correct option (easy)
• Choose the correct option.
• Complete the sentences.
• Criminal offenses

The environment. Vocabulary

Droughts, floods, hurricanes, typhoons... While these natural disasters have always happened in the world, there is no doubt that they are becoming more and more frequent these days. The world is warming up and this is having an effect in the climate. Can this be blamed just on nature or is it man-made? There is a great deal of controversy among scientists about this issue, but it's not for me to go into it today. Instead, what I would like to look at in depth is the vocabulary about climate change and the environment.

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In order to learn the vocabulary related to the environment, let's have a look at this presentation:


Let's see some words and expressions that need further explanation:

• Biodiversity is the variety of plants and animals that can be found in a geographical region. This variety needs to be preserved, as these organisms depend on one another to survive.
• Our development will be sustainable if we can cover our present needs without putting at risk the ability of future generations to do the same. That is, we shouldn't use up all the resources today because we are not leaving enough resources for our children and grand-children.
• If we don't want to cause any harm to nature, we should be carbon neutral, that is, we shouldn't throw carbon dioxide to the atmosphere or, in any case, try to compensate it by recycing, planting trees or giving money so that other people can do that for ourselves. In that way, we would be offsetting our carbon footprint.

Reduce your carbon footprint
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Though it's true that industries are greatly responsible for polluting the environment, we are not too small or unimportant to fight pollution. There's a saying in English: "Every little helps". Have you ever thought about what you can do to help the environment? In this video there are a few ideas. After watching it, you can do the comprehension questions below.

Finally, here are some exercises:
Choose the correct option.
Match the words and the definitions.
Reading comprehension.
"Save tropical rainforests". Choose the right option to fill in the gaps.
A complete exercise about global warming.

Scotland: a project by 2º ESO students

Last year I had a great group of 2º ESO students. They were just 12 or 13 years old. However, their level of English was quite high, so I asked them to do a project presentation about Scotland and I was very pleased with the result.

Old men of Storr, by Iguana Jo in Fickr

The idea was to create a collaborative presentation with Google Docs. First, I showed them how easy it is to use this web tool. You can see it in this video.


Being digital natives, they had no problem whatsoever to learn the basics. Then, I showed them a presentation with the procedure they had to follow and the questions they had to answer. Here it is:



I also created the presentation they were going to work on. I just put the title and a picture and sent it to their e-mail addresses, enabling them to edit it. I also warned them to be careful not to delete their classmates' work!

And here is their presentation. Isn't it great?


I hope this can be an inspiration for EFL classes, because sometimes it is not easy to find topics for projects.