The Ethics Brand
Grammar: Conditionals
A Level 5 English lesson exploring media.
What's in this lesson
A Level 5 (advanced) ESL lesson on media, practising conditionals. The worksheet has a reading, target vocabulary, a grammar reference with practice and discussion questions.
From the reading: The Ethics Brand
Walk through the business district of any major city — Dubai, São Paulo, Singapore, Stockholm — and you will find, pressed into the glass facades of banks and printed on the linen tags of fashion boutiques, a single word that has somehow survived every abuse hurled at it: ethical. Ethical banking. Ethical fashion. Ethical AI. The word glows with the same reassuring warmth it always did, even as the institutions deploying it have, in case after documented case, been found to mean something considerably narrower than the customer imagined. Were the word a person, it would be exhausted.
Vocabulary
- accountability gap
- co-opt the language
- greenwashing scandal
- virtue signalling
Grammar: Conditionals
- Zero conditional
- If a company claims ethics but ignores accountability, it loses credibility. — universal moral truth
- Mixed: past → present
- If she had studied the data, she would be more sceptical now. — past condition, present result
Discussion questions
- What would you do if you discovered your employer was greenwashing its environmental record?
- Imagine you could see every company's real ethics score — would you change what you buy?
- If a lie makes someone feel better and harms no one, is it still wrong?
The Ethics Brand
Grammar: Conditionals
What's in this lesson:
Full lesson plan with reading, grammar, vocabulary, and discussion.
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