English Vocabulary in Use Advance (Unit 100: In the headlines)


Match the headline to its story and explain the play on words in each case.

a. A grandfather’s breathing problems were solved when doctors found four false teeth at the entrance to his lungs. They had been forced down his windpipe in a car crash eight years before.
b. A 25-year-old terrapin is being treated for a fractured shell aft er surviving a 200-foot drop.
c. A Shetland teacher has suggested sheepdogs could be used to control pupils in playgrounds.
d. A ghost society has been told not to scare off a friendly female apparition at a hotel.
e. An unusual travel company is off ering adults the chance to experience going back to school again – they will spend a week wearing school uniform, sitting through lessons and eating school dinners.
f. An ex-public loo in Hackney, East London, is to be sold for £276,000.
g. A Whitby vicar has attacked the resort’s attempts to profit on its connections with Dracula: ‘a palefaced man with a bad sense of fashion, severe dental problems and an eating disorder’.
h. A toad triggered a police alert when it set off a new hi-tech alarm system.
i. Firefighters had to scale a 30-foot tree to rescue a man who was trying to capture his pet iguana.
  1. Bad blood
  2. Happy days?
  3. Shell-shocked
  4. False impressions
  5. Happy haunting
  6. Hopping mad
  7. Flushed with success
  8. Highly embarrassed
  9. Round-up
Detail Answer

  1. g Dracula was a blood-drinking vampire in a famous 19th-century novel of the same name, who comes to Whitby in north-east England from Transylvania. ‘Bad blood’ is also an expression used to mean bad feelings between people. There will probably be bad blood between the vicar of Whitby and the people who are making a profit from the Dracula connections of the town.
  2. e School days are often referred to as the ‘happiest days of your life’.
  3. b ‘Shell-shocked’ means traumatised or in a state of great shock. It describes how soldiers in the trenches in World War I felt after they had been subjected to shells or bombs for a long time. Terrapins and tortoises have shells and they would certainly be shocked (in the medical sense) by falling from such a height.
  4. a Dentists make impressions of teeth and ‘false impressions’ is a common collocation used to mean incorrect impressions created by a person.
  5. d This is meant to recall the phrase ‘happy hunting’. ‘Haunting’, however, is what a ghost does. An ‘apparition’ is a kind of ghost.
  6. h ‘Hopping mad’ is a collocation meaning extremely cross. It is appropriate here as toads and frogs hop along the ground. Hopping mad is also no doubt how the police felt when they discovered they had been called out by a toad.
  7. f Toilets ‘flush’ [water passes through them]. ‘Flushed’ also means to be red in the face. It collocates strongly with the phrase ‘with success’; the people who have sold the toilet for such a large sum of money are likely to feel successful.
  8. i ‘Highly embarrassed’ means extremely embarrassed. It is doubly appropriate here as the man is so high up the tree that he has to be rescued by the fire brigade – certainly an embarrassing situation.
  9. c Sheepdogs ‘round up’ sheep. They are a kind of dog and it is suggested that they should round up the children.
Exercise-100.2


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