EOI NAVARRA B1 ENGLISH

INTERACTION AND MEDIATION

Preparation 4 minutes

TRAVELLING: Weekend getaway Candidate A

Situation: You are planning to spend a long weekend with your friends Peter and Sue in Valencia.

Discuss the aspects below with your partner to reach an agreement. When you discuss
accommodation, explain the two options in detail to your partner and answer the questions s/he
may have.

Three-star hotel Rented flat

Double bedroom 120€ per night 1 Bedroom (+ 1 sofa bed), 1 bathroom

Bed and Breakfast 60 € per night
Spa and outdoor swimming pool In the city centre

CANDIDATE A (starts the conversation)

Reach an agreement with your partner about:

● accommodation
● means of transport
● activities during the weekend
● time to go and come back
● ………………
EOI NAVARRA B1 ENGLISH

INTERACTION AND MEDIATION

Preparation 4 minutes

TRAVELLING: Weekend getaway Candidate B

Situation: You are planning to spend a long weekend with your friends Peter and Sue in Valencia.

Discuss the aspects below with your partner to reach an agreement. When you discuss means of
transport, explain the two options in detail to your partner and answer the questions s/he may have.

Coach Train

42 € per person 65 € per person

8-hour journey 6-hour journey
Departures at 7:00 am/10am/13:00 pm/4:30 pm Station on the outskirt

CANDIDATE B (finishes the conversation)

Reach an agreement with your partner about:

● accommodation
● means of transport
● activities during the weekend
● time to go and come back
● ………………
EOI NAVARRA B2 ENGLISH
TASK 1: SPEAKING & MEDIATING
Preparation time: 20 minutes
Speaking time: 4-5 minutes
Instructions:
Read the text attached and prepare a presentation (as if it was to present in class) reporting
the relevant information (main ideas and relevant details). Then prepare an answer to the
questions below.
Happiness
Notes:
Use the space below to take notes. You may refer to your notes during the presentation but
you must not read them word-for-word.

● Do you think you live among happy people?

● To what extent can money add to your level of happiness?
● According to you, what factors influence the most on personal happiness?
What is Happiness, Anyway?
By Acacia Parks, PhD.

What is happiness? People have agonized over this question for centuries, but only recently has science
begun to weigh in on the debate. Before I get into what the science has concluded, let me start by giving
some answers to a somewhat easier question: what isn’t happiness?
Happiness is Not: Feeling Good All The Time
Skeptics have often asked whether a person who uses
cocaine every day is “happy.” If feeling good all the time
were our only requirement, then the answer would be
“yes.” However, recent research suggests that an even-
keeled mood is more psychologically healthy than a
mood in which you achieve great heights of happiness
regularly—after all, what goes up must come down.
Furthermore, when you ask people what makes their
lives worth living, they rarely say anything about their
mood. They are more likely to cite things that they find meaningful, such as their work or relationships.
Recent research even suggests that if you focus too much on trying to feel good all the time, you’ll actually
undermine your ability to feel good at all—in other words, no amount of feeling good will be satisfying to
you, since what you expect (all the time) isn’t physically possible for most people.
Happiness is Not: Being Rich or Affording Everything You Want
While living below the poverty line certainly makes it hard to be happy, beyond that, money does not
appear to buy happiness. Imagine you unexpectedly get a $10,000/year raise. While you would certainly be
excited in the short term, it would only be a matter of time before your expectations change to fit your new
budget. Before you know it, you’re just as happy as you were before the raise! This holds true for new
houses, new cars, new gadgets, and all of the other material goods that people spend so much time pining
for. The only exception to this rule is when you spend your money on experiences with other people so if
you took that extra $10,000/year and spent it on some weekend getaways to new and exciting places with
your friends or family, then you might get happier. However, this is rarely how people choose to spend
windfalls.
Happiness is Not: A Final Destination
The old adage, “Are we there yet?” is often applied to discussions of happiness, as if a person works
towards happiness and one day “arrives.” Contrary to popular belief, however, unless you are one of the
few who won the genetic lottery and are naturally happy, it takes regular effort to maintain happiness.
Most established techniques for becoming happier—keeping a gratitude journal, for example—are habits,
not one-shot events, and most life events that make us happy in the short-term, like getting married or
being promoted, fade over time as we adapt to them.
So, What IS Happiness?
The research suggests that happiness is a combination of how satisfied you are with your life (for example,
finding meaning in your work) and how good you feel on a day-to-day basis. Both of these are relatively
stable—that is, our life changes, and our mood fluctuates, but our general happiness is more genetically
determined than anything else. The good news is, with consistent effort, this can be offset. Think of it like
you think about weight: if you eat how you want to and are as active as you want to be, your body will
settle at a certain weight. But if you eat less than you'd like or exercise more, your weight will adjust
accordingly. If that new diet or exercise regimen becomes part of your everyday life, then you'll stay at this
new weight. If you go back to eating and exercising the way you used to, your weight will return to where it
started. So it goes, too, with happiness.
In other words, you have the ability to control how you feel—and with consistent practice, you can form
life-long habits for a more satisfying and fulfilling life.
https://www.happify.com
EOI NAVARRA C1 ENGLISH
TASK 1: SPEAKING AND MEDIATING
Preparation time: 20 minutes
Speaking time: 4-5 minutes
Instructions:
Read the texts attached and prepare a presentation about the topic a presentation (as if it was
to present in class) reporting the relevant information (main ideas and relevant details) from
the three texts. Then prepare an answer to the questions below.
Plastic, a lost battle?
Notes:
Use the space below to take notes. You may refer to your notes during the presentation but
you must not read them word-for-word.

● Do you think people around you are worried about plastic use?
● Do you try to reduce your plastic use? How?
● Do you agree that the fight against plastic is a lost battle?
A Seventh Continent Called Pacific Trash Vortex
There is an island where no one wants to live. Yet it is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, not too
far from beautiful Hawaii. And it’s really pure and wild, an atoll with bright colors that, given its
geographical location, is just as good as Bora Bora or the Cook Islands. So why so much
revulsion?
Imagine a huge pile of plastic waste of all kinds that
had been accumulating since the fifties,
undisturbed, in the sea, to the point where it has
become a continent made of trash. A large island
that is not there because it is not marked on the
maps. It is not even visible from satellites, as it is
located just below the sea surface, 10 meters deep.
Pacific Trash Vortex, also known as a large patch of
garbage in the Pacific, however, does exist. It was
discovered in the late ’80s by the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It was
formed due to the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a slow ocean current that moves in a clockwise
spiral, produced by a system of currents at high pressure. This current collects the garbage and
gathers it into two major groups: one at about 500 nautical miles off the coast of California, and
one off of the Japanese coast.
It must be said that this big blob silently disintegrates into fragments and smaller pieces. These tiny
bits are the result of a photo degradation, as crazy as it is harmful. Although they are not visible,
they are present and mix with the marine plankton that fish and jellyfish eat. This leads to poison
that is entering the food chain.
https://theglobaloyster.com/

Plastics and the environment

Plastics are inexpensive, lightweight, strong, durable, corrosion-resistant materials, with high
thermal and electrical insulation properties. The diversity of polymers and the versatility of their
properties are used to make a vast array of products that bring medical and technological
advances, energy savings and numerous other societal
benefits. As a consequence, the production of plastics has
increased substantially over the last 60 years from around 0.5
million tonnes in 1950 to over 260 million tonnes today. In
Europe alone the plastics industry has a turnover in excess of
300 million euros and employs 1.6 million people. Almost all
aspects of daily life involve plastics, in transport,
telecommunications, clothing, footwear and as packaging
materials that facilitate the transport of a wide range of food, drink and other goods. […]

However, there is considerable concern about the adverse effects of these chemicals on wildlife
and humans. In addition to the reliance on finite resources for plastic production, and concerns
about additive effects of different chemicals, current patterns of usage are generating global waste
management problems. Some researches show that plastic wastes, including packaging, electrical
equipment and plastics from end-of-life vehicles, are major components of both household and
industrial wastes; our capacity for disposal of waste to landfill is finite and in some locations
landfills are at, or are rapidly approaching, capacity. Accumulation of plastic debris in the
environment and the associated consequences are largely avoidable. Considerable immediate
reductions in the quantity of waste entering natural environments, as opposed to landfill, could be
achieved by better waste disposal and material handling. Littering is a behavioural issue and some
have suggested that it has increased in parallel with our use of disposable products and
packaging. Perhaps increasing the capacity to recycle will help to reverse this trend such that we
start to regard end-of-life materials as valuable feedstocks for new production rather than waste.
To achieve this will require better education, engagement, enforcement and recycling capacity.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov