Learn English With News Headlines

One way to pick up new phrases and idioms, and to understand the news better, is to look at the main headlines of your favourite newspaper, and to guess what you think the story will be about.

Here’s how you can do it:

1. Look at the headline of a story
2. Look up any unknown words or expressions in your dictionary
3. Then guess what you think the story will be about, based on the headline you’ve just checked

Alternatively, if you don’t understand what the headline is about, you can read the main paragraph, and then guess what you think the headline means. Following this, you can look up any unknown words once more in a dictionary.

Here Is Today’s News

Melbourne’s Herald-Sun newspaper uses quite a bit of idiomatic language in today’s headlines, which you can find at heraldsun.com.au.

First, you see the idiom a blessing in disguise. We use this when we want to say that even though something bad has happened, there might be some good that comes out of it.

Next, you see that someone is between a rock and a hard place. If you’re caught or stuck between a rock and a hard place, it means you’re in a very difficult position, where it’s going to be hard to make a choice.

Another headline goes: “Joe show’s we’ve got a long way to go.” Here, the meaning is that even if you’ve made progress on a particular issue or in solving a problem, it hasn’t been fully resolved, and indeed there is still much work to do to get to where you want to be.

In doom monger, it’s not really a common collocation; however the writer has used this phrase to describe a group of people negatively. More frequently you hear of rumour-mongers (people that spread gossip) and scare-mongers (people who say bad things to get others to feel afraid of a particular situation). Once you know rumour-monger and scare-monger, you can guess doom monger.

Finally, you can see a story about the actress Gweneth Paltrow and singer Chris Martin of Coldplay. If Chris played around, it means that he went outside of the relationship with his wife and found another lover or two…

Over To You

Go to a newspaper or news site which you like. Scan the front page and see if you can find 3 idiomatic expressions.

Did you find any? Please leave a comment below telling us which ones you found.

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And here is the news – active listening in a minute