Test your French 8
| Généralement, les gens qui savant peu parlent beacoup, et les gens qui savant beaucoup parlent peu. Generally speaking, the people who know little speak a lot and the people who know a lot speak little. Rousseau. |
1. Faux amis
Choose the correct definition
1. Bail
a) Lease
b) Free from prison
2. En Biais
a) Favoring one person over another
b) At an angle
3. Change
a) Money exchange
b) Coins
4. Ball trap
a) Painful experience
b) clay pigeon shooting
5. Contrôler
a) To inspect
b) to be in charge
| se construire des châteaux en Espagne – to make plans which are unlikely to come to fruition (il se construit des chateaux en Espagne) During the occupation of Spain by the Moors, it was not worth planning to build a castle as it would have been attacked by the Moors |
2. Match up these idiomatic sayings
1.J’a les crocs
2. J’ai la gueule de bois
3. Un coup de foudre
4. Faire le pont
5. J’ai le trace
6. Faire un cinéma de quelque chose
7. Ne le prends pas sur ce ton
8. Ça me prend la tête !
9. Un sou est un sou.
10 Il tombe des cordes
a) to make a big deal of something
b) Love at first sight
c) It’s raining cats and dogs
d) long weekend
e) I’ve got butterflies in my stomach
f) Don’t take it like that
g) I’m hungry
h) That drives me crazy!
i) I have a hangover
j) every penny counts
| Language tips Eng: My hair IS blonde (sing) French: Mes cheveux SONT blonds (plural) English: I bought my trousers at M&S (plural) |
3. Collioure, Matisse and Fauvism – Your language challenge
In spring 1905, Henri Matisse landed in Collioure, searching for light and a new style of painting. It was in Colioure that he painted the famous Open Window, with vibrant colours and reflex ions that did not fit in with the expected – vermillion masts of blue boats floating on pink waves below a sky of turquoise, and pink. This unconventional use of colour provoked an outrage when Matisse exhibited Open Window, later in the year at the Salon d’Automne in Paris where audiences saw this painting and similar works by Matisse, André Derain, their friend Maurice de Vlaminck, and others. It was reported that people scratched at the canvases in derision, and a critic, noting the presence of a Renaissance-style statuette in the centre of the room, joked “Tiens, Donatello chez les fauves” (Well, well, Donatello among the wild beasts). Soon, these artists were being called the fauves, and the exhibition room le cage. The world glimpsed what art would be in the twentieth century as the fauves became the forerunners of free expression of colour. “When I put a green,” Matisse was reported to have said later “it is not grass. When I put a blue, it is not the sky.” And so was born Fauvism
Now put these French sentences into the right order to describe the text in French.
a)Les œuvres de Matisse et ses copains ont été critiqués à une exposition à Paris.
b) C’était ici qu’il a commence à peindre avec des couleurs peu conventionnelles
c) Cette nouvelle approche à la couleur a vu naître le fauvisme.
d) Au Printemps, il y a cent ans, Henri Matisse est arrivé à Collioure, à la recherché de la lumière
e) Il semble que des gens ont attaqué les toiles et ont comparé les artistes aux animaux sauvages en leur traitant de ‘fauves’
Answers (only look as a last resort or to check your answers)
1 1a 2b 3a 4b 5a
2 1g 2i 3b 4d 5e 6a 7f 8h 9j 10c
3 1d 2b 3a 4e 5c
