Paco had had a dream about this journey before: Airport Authorities had cancelled some flights because of bad weather conditions

In unit 5 Paco arrives in the U.S.A. In this unit, Paco is going to visit New York (topic 2), Washington D.C. (topic 3), Florida (topic 4) and, finally, Chicago (topic 5).

As for English grammar, you are going to identify, recognize and infer some grammar rules about the Past Perfect Tense; conditional sentences (type 3); present and past tenses in the Passive Voice; have/get something done and the use of question tags.

Let's begin, enjoy yourself and learn with Paco about the USA.

Reading activity

Paco was afraid of not being able to travel to the USA because the Airport Authorities had cancelled some flights and others were delayed because of the bad weather conditions. But, at last, his flight to New York took off and he was really happy when the plane was in the air.

By the time Paco arrived at JFK International Airport in New York, he was rather tired but he was also excited and willing to get to know the city. If anybody had cancelled Paco's flight, he would have been very upset, but he was lucky and it didn't happen.


By Doug Letterman. Creative Commons.	By U. P. I. .Public domain.	By Mike Powell. Creative Commons.

Try to identify in the text a sentence ...:

1) in the Past Perfect Tense.

2) a passive sentence, either present or past.

3) a type 3 conditional sentence.

Reflexión

Vocabulary building

Adding affixes to existing words (the base or root) to form new words is common in academic English. Prefixes are added to the front of the base (advantage

disadvantage), whereas suffixes are added to the end of the base (active

activate).

Prefixes usually do not change the class of the base word (advantage and disadvantage are both nouns), but suffixes usually do change the class of the word as you can see in the examples above (active= adjective, activate= verb).

Curiosity

John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York

John F. Kennedy International Airport is an international airport located in Queens County, New York in southeastern New York City about 12 miles (19 km) from Lower Manhattan. It is the busiest international air passenger gateway to the United States. The airport is named after John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States.

John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy (May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963), often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963.

After Kennedy's military service as commander of the Motor Torpedo Boat PT-109 during World War II in the South Pacific, his aspirations turned political. With the encouragement and grooming of his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., Kennedy represented Massachusetts's 11th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1947 to 1953 as a Democrat, and served in the U.S. Senate from 1953 until 1960. Kennedy defeated then Vice President and Republican candidate Richard Nixon in the 1960 U.S. presidential election, one of the closest in American history. He was the second-youngest President (after Theodore Roosevelt), the first President born in the 20th century, and the youngest elected to the office, at the age of 43. Kennedy is the first and only Catholic president, and is the only president to have won a Pulitzer Prize. Events during his administration include the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the building of the Berlin Wall, the Space Race, the African American Civil Rights Movement and early events of the Vietnam War.

Adapted from Wikipedia.

Now it's turn to begin with the presentation of the grammar points we are going to study in this topic. Let's begin with the Past Perfect Tense.