Introduction
Winston Churchill’s tenacity, eloquence and principled refusal, regardless of the cost, to embrace seductive European promises of ‘progress’ and ‘harmony’ carried Blitz-torn Britain and persuaded a hesitant America to join the Allies.
SIR Winston Churchill, appointed Prime Minister in 1940 to lead Britain’s successful war effort against the Nazis, died on January 24, 1965, aged 90.
He was to be buried in Bladon, a village near Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire where Churchill was born in 1874.
On January 30th, a funeral train of six carriages set out from Waterloo station in London - apparently Churchill’s own calculated reference to the famous battle in 1815 - behind ‘Battle of Britain’ class steam locomotive No. 34051, which in 1947 had been named in Churchill’s honour; No. 34064 ‘Fighter Command’ was the appropriate backup.
Hundreds of thousands of grateful British subjects — possibly as many as a million, old, young, and even babies in their prams — lined the route muffled in thick coats and woolly hats on a bleak and overcast day, as driver Alf Hurley and 22-year-old fireman Jim Lester carried Britain’s heroic and charismatic statesman to his final place of rest.*
Archive
Word Games
Sevens Based on this passage
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
Variations: 1.expand your answer to exactly fourteen words. 2.expand your answer further, to exactly twenty-one words. 3.include one of the following words in your answer: if, but, despite, because, (al)though, unless.
Jigsaws Based on this passage
Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.
Spinners Find in Think and Speak
For each group of words, compose a sentence that uses all three. You can use any form of the word: for example, cat → cats, go → went, or quick → quickly, though neigh → neighbour is stretching it a bit.
This exercise uses words found in the accompanying passage.
1 Apparent. Appropriate. His.
2 Class. War. Year.
3 Carriage. Own. Station.
Variations: 1. include direct and indirect speech 2. include one or more of these words: although, because, despite, either/or, if, unless, until, when, whether, which, who 3. use negatives (not, isn’t, neither/nor, never, nobody etc.)
Add Vowels Find in Think and Speak
Make words by adding vowels to each group of consonants below. You may add as many vowels as you like before, between or after the consonants, but you may not add any consonants or change the order of those you have been given. See if you can beat our target of common words.
pls (13+2)
pails. pales. pals. peals. peels. piles. pleas. please. plies. plus. poles. pools. pulse.
opals. pilaus.
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