Your Brain on Breaking News
Grammar: Inversion
A Business English English lesson exploring technology.
What's in this lesson
A Business English ESL lesson on technology, practising inversion. The worksheet has a reading, target vocabulary, a grammar reference with practice and discussion questions.
From the reading: Your Brain on Breaking News
Here is a number that should unsettle you. A false story spreads six times faster on X than a true one. Not slightly faster. Six times. Researchers at MIT — Soroush Vosoughi and his colleagues — published this finding in Science in 2018, and the media world has been quietly ignoring it ever since. Why? Because the finding is bad for business. Outrage is the product. Engagement bait is the factory. And your brain is the machine that runs it.
Vocabulary
- bury the lead
- go to press
- pull the plug
- run with a story
Grammar: Inversion
- Inversion for emphasis
- Rarely has a single tweet caused such immediate market movement. — stress a negative or limiting adverb by inverting subject and auxiliary
- Fronting for focus
- What the algorithm promotes is not truth but engagement. — move key information to the front of the sentence for rhetorical weight
Discussion questions
- Imagine you could redesign one social media platform from scratch — what single change would you make?
- If you had to go to press with a story you were not 100% sure about, what would you do?
- What would you do if you discovered a story you had shared was false?
Your Brain on Breaking News
Grammar: Inversion
What's in this lesson:
Full lesson plan with reading, grammar, vocabulary, and discussion.
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