Brain Teaser

[DaiHard]

Here is an exercise that I give my students:

This is a list of the most popular words in spoken English (in the UK)

I, up, look, we, like, and, on, at, for, he, is, said, go, you, are, this, going, they, away, play, a, am, cat, to, come, day, the, dog, big, my, mum, no, dad, all, get, in, went, was, of, me, she, see, it, yes, can, about, after, again, an, another

The task is to create sentences, using as many words as possible but using each word only once. You can't change the tense nor add or subtract letters (so it can't become it's or its for example) nor can you add any extra words.

The best I've seen is using 48 words out of the 50.

Can you do better?

[Petch01]

Can you do better?

No, not now. Too tired.

Petch01

[aussiestyle1983]

Seems like a good time waster to give the students

[PeaceBlondie]

Only one sentence, right? Even a very compound, complex sentence?

[DaiHard]

Only one sentence, right? Even a very compound, complex sentence?

No as many sentences as you want but you can only use a word once. Once its used then you can't use it again. BTW one student did use all 50 words but only by concatenating to and day together; which I thought was cheating

[Thaiboxer]

How about telling them to come up with a sentence that uses every letter in the English alphabet at least once. Here's the one I remember: The quick, brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

This would be a good filler activity.

[aussiestyle1983]

How about telling them to come up with a sentence that uses every letter in the English alphabet at least once. Here's the one I remember: The quick, brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

This would be a good filler activity.

where is the 's'?

maybe change jumped to jumps, or is that what you meant.

[Thaiboxer]

Ah, forgot the "s"! It should be "jumps", otherwise it wouldn't have all the letters. My mistake.