Answers to the previous page

Back to basics  

A bad hair day

Base jumping

Been there, done it

Benefit tourism

Black box flight recorder

Body piercing

Bog standard

Bungee jumping

To bring home the bacon

Researchers, scientists etc. often referred to as ‘the backroom boys’

For personal profit people may climb on the bandwagon

A spreader of false information he was known to bandy gossip about

Frankly I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole

He always got it wrong, barking up the wrong tree

An open talker he’s never been known to beat about the bush

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Answers from above

Adjectives           

Drinks - cool,  cold,  chilly                     

Lemonade - clear, cloudy                    

Clothes - costly, cheap                          

An Arc - convex,  concave                         

Clipping

Advertisement           ampere            demonstration

Examination              laboratory         specification

Spectacles                revolutions        television

Compounds

Firewall

Laptop

Website

Broadband

Desktop

Word Play: C

We continue our ‘Word Play’ pages with the letter ‘C’

Tricky spellings

Condemn – watch for the silent ‘m’  

Changeable – watch for the ‘e’ in the middle

Conscience – watch for the ‘s’ and ‘c’ together

Committed – 2 ‘m’s and 2 ‘t’s – also as in ‘committee’

Playing with Comma’s

There is often disagreement over the use of commas and someone has said keep them to a minimum while others say them frequently to make greater sense. So when do you use a comma?  Here some starting basics:

A) When you can lift out a phrase  or clause in the sentence

And the rest of the sentence still makes sense

And, imagining you take a short breath at the comma, it helps make more sense as you read it. For example –

“A few weeks ago, just after my birthday, my aunt came to stay.”

Take out the words between the commas, “just after my birthday” and the remaining sentence “A few weeks ago my aunt came to stay,”   can stand on its own

B) When you have a list of items

         which will always end with an ‘and’, for example

“For lunch we had soup, rolls, salad with meat, some ice cream, and a drink.”

“At the zoo we saw lions, cheetahs, elephants, giraffes and tigers”

Note that the final comma before the ‘and’ can be left out.

C) To separate adjectives (describing words)

           For example

“It was a hot, dry and dusty road.”

“He was a short, round and comical figure.”

Note that with adjectives the comma is left out before the final ‘and’.