Graded Stories
Noah Casanova
Reading is a great way to practise and improve your English. Our Reading zone has stories, articles and reviews that have been specially written for English language learners, at three different levels. First, choose your level and then choose a text to read that looks interesting to you.
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Scroll down to the bottom of the page for more information about Andrew and other places you can find his writing. And this post contains the four I wrote. Two more stories are here, written by Clive Hiley.
Dr Tomas Streyer looked around the control room at his team of scientists and engineers. He was pretending to be calm, but he was both excited and terrified. The next few minutes would be the starting point of years more research towards understanding the secrets of how the universe began.
When the stone fruit dropped from the trees, they were black and hard. Over four long months, they slowly turned from black to grey and, at last, to silver. Then their skin would break open easily to show the sweet, sun-coloured fruit inside.
Andrew Leon Hudson is a technical writer by day, and is technically a writer by night as well. He lives in Barcelona, Spain, and is also the editor of Mythaxis, a free-to-read online magazine of speculative fiction. You can learn more about his writing activities on his website, and very infrequently on Twitter.
The idea for First star I see tonight came when I was thinking about how long it takes for light to travel between the stars and the Earth, and wondered what it would have been like to see one for the first time. So I found a way for that to happen.
Anyway, here are the stories I came up with and, at the bottom of the page, you can read about the inspiration for each one, that mystical spark that catches light sometimes and, to me, is what makes writing worth it. At its best, inspiration is as near to a religious experience as I will ever get because it can feel like channelling something from outside me.
All the stories come with vocab and comprehension exercises and make great discussion tasks for post-reading in class. The excerpts below are from the higher-level versions with links underneath to take you to either version on the British Council site.
Learning beginner level Japanese can be frustrating at times when you want to be able to do more with the language. I often see people asking about reading materials for JLPT N5 and N4 level learners.
The trick is that most novels and light novels written by Japanese people for Japanese people. The Japanese language that native Japanese speakers learn is a little different from the Japanese non-native speakers learn. Which can make finding good books for beginner Japanese learners difficult.
It has 15 short stories in Japanese with literal English translations, then explanations for grammar and vocabulary. There is no furigana which might make these stories difficult for learners not used to reading kanji.
Anyone have any success with transferring lower grade 5 day embryos? I had a Donor FET on Sunday and after the first 8 of our embryos did not survive the thaw because our old clinic did not freeze them correctly, we were left with only 3 left that survived! This was devastating after going thru the whole donor egg process. We transferred all 3, the grades were 5BB, 5BC, 6BB. As our embryologist informed us, they were the lowest grades of everything we had.\n
Hi!! Your embryos aren't AA but they aren't bad either! We had 5-5BB embryos and 1-5AB embryo after our two cycles. We implanted one of the 5BBs in a eSET FET in April and I am heading into my second trimester. We saw her earlier this week on ultrasound and all looked great. Don't be discouraged, I think you have a great chance for success!! Thinking of you!! :)
My 4bb embryos are currently asleep in their room (twin 2yr old girls) and I'm currently 31 weeks pregnant with our 4bb little boy. I'm so sorry that your old lab screwed up so bad. Hopefully you were in some way compensated. Please keep in touch, I'd love to hear about your outcome ?
wow, thankyou @sweepea13 and maggie1315, you have given me hope! It is so great to hear that embryo's similar to mine resulted in real live babies! One question for you both: did you do PGD testing for these embryos? We did not perform genetic testing on ours. Thanks!
I'm sorry sorry to hear that your clinic did this to you!!! What a stressful situation we are all already in. I just want to say I no longer believe in the grading!! I have read SO MANY things where people say when they got to their 'worst' graded embryos it worked. I just BAD MENTS miscarried a 6 BA pgd tested embryo END MENT. There's unfortunately a lot of trying in this but I try and tell myself if I just keep trying...eventually.
I'd like not to focus on the grading. I guess since all the rest of our embryo's didn't survive the thaw, the grading doesn't matter all that much since this is all we have. Since our eggs were thru an egg donor it was a big financial blow and we won't be able to do that again. If none of these embryos stick, I am not sure what we will do.
Anyone have any success with transferring lower grade 5 day embryos? I had a Donor FET on Sunday and after the first 8 of our embryos did not survive the thaw because our old clinic did not freeze them correctly, we were left with only 3 left that survived! This was devastating after going thru the whole donor egg process. We transferred all 3, the grades were 5BB, 5BC, 6BB. As our embryologist informed us, they were the lowest grades of everything we had.
The difficulty of the stories increases with the introduction of the subjunctive. As this is an area of Spanish many people struggle with, only the two most common subjunctive verb tenses are introduced.
Excellent for practising your listening skills, the stories are read by native speakers from various countries so you will feel confident in any Spanish speaking country. Perfect for all levels, the speed at which the stories are read increases with each level.
No matter what your level, you will be able to practice. The beginner level starts off with the basics, then with each level, more grammar is introduced into the stories, along with longer sentences and more difficult vocabulary.
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All coffee beans are graded by an international body of qualified specialists (Q graders) whose job is to sample newly processed coffee beans and score them based on the strict criteria of the cupping form.
Thankfully, this is where graded readers come in! Graded readers are book series that feature a variety of stories sorted into different levels of difficulty, or "grades." For Japanese, this usually is determined by the vocabulary and grammar used, often corresponding to the 5 levels of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT), but different publishers and organizations have different levels and definitions. Graded readers offer everyone, even Japanese beginners, fun stories to read. Not only is this an enjoyable, confidence-building activity, but it'll make your Japanese a lot better too!
So, ready to dive in? Great! In this article, I will talk more about what graded readers are and how to get the most out of them. My co-author Emily and I have also taken a look at some of the options available so we can recommend the best graded readers for you, regardless of whether you prefer to use digital books or physical ones, free libraries or paid collections, or even an app.
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