Dream jobs
READING
1 What jobs do you see in the photos below? What other jobs can you name in English? With a partner, write down as many as you can.
2 Which of the jobs you thought of in Exercise 1 …
1 sometimes involves work in the evening or at night?
2 needs a lot of training?
3 involves work at weekends?
4 is well paid?
5 gets a lot of holidays?
6 can be dangerous?
3 SPEAKING Compare your ideas from Exercises 1 and 2 with others in the class.
4 Look at these photographs. What jobs do you think the people have?
5 Look at the sentences below about different jobs. Read and listen to the article and decide if each sentence is correct or incorrect. If it is correct, mark it True. If it is incorrect, mark it False.
DREAM JOBS
Have you ever imagined the perfect job? What would you choose? Here are three that would be on our list!
The sweetest job
Swizell’s is a company in Britain that makes sweets. The sweets are made in the company’s factory near Manchester in the north of England, and they’re eaten by kids all over the country. Harry Willsher is one of the company’s employees, but he’s only 12 years old! His job is probably the best job in the factory – he’s the company’s official sweet tester.
When a new sweet is invented, it’s made in a special department in the factory – all very secret. Then, the new sweet is sent to Harry’s house for him to test. He eats it, writes a report about it and sends his report to the factory. And then a decision is made about whether to make the sweet or not.
Is Harry paid for the job? Well, no, he isn’t paid because he’s too young to work for money. But he gets free sweets!
Harry says: ‘When I started the job, I felt like I was in the book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory!’ Harry has got a special uniform and business cards. He’s got a really sweet job, you might say!
Desert Island Blogger
Would you like to look after an island in the Pacific Ocean? Almost 35,000 people applied for the job, but Ben Southall got it. How was the winner chosen? Well, after Ben showed that he was good at blogging and swimming, there was an interview. He was asked lots of questions to see if he had the right kind of personality for the job. And he did!
So what did Ben have to do in this job? It was hard work! He had to live on his own in a 3-bedroom villa (with a swimming pool) on Hamilton Island and spend every day swimming, exploring and relaxing. Then he had to write a blog to promote the area.
Ben was paid $111,000 for six months’ work.
The people he worked for liked his work very much. After he finished on Hamilton Island, he became Tourism Ambassador for the state of Queensland, Australia.
Sleeping on the job
Usually, sleeping on the job is a big problem for an employee – if you fall asleep, you’ll be fired! But Roisin Madigan, from Birmingham, UK, was paid to sleep on the job. She tested luxury beds.
Roisin was paid £1,000 to sleep in designer beds every day for a month. A company that makes beds for luxury hotels wanted to know more about what makes ‘a good night’s sleep’. Roisin was selected to spend up to eight hours a day in a bed and then write about it. Over 600 people applied for the job, but they weren’t chosen, of course – it was only Roisin who got to sleep on the job!
THINK VALUES
What’s important in a job?
1 What do you think about Harry, Ben and Roisin’s jobs? Tick ([latex]\checkmark[/latex]) the boxes.
2 SPEAKING Compare your ideas with others in the class.
3 Think of a job you might like to do in the future and write it down. Look at values a–f below. Rank each one 1–6 (1 = low, 6 = high) for your job.
4 SPEAKING Talk to others in your class. Compare your job and values with theirs.
GRAMMAR
The passive: present simple and past simple
1 Complete the sentences from the article above. Then choose the correct options to complete the rules about the passive.
2 Complete the sentences with the present simple passive or past simple passive form of the verbs.
3 How many passive sentences can you make? (Your sentences can be positive or negative.)
