Did you know that the lastest cost of the London Olympic Games 2012 is £11 billion! Wow! Now, that’s a big number! Do you have any idea of what the original cost was? It was £2.4 billion! And we thought that was expensive! I’ve been reading a bit about the cost of the Olympic Games and every time I read an article I come across the same word to describe the cost of the Olympic Games. What’s the word? SPIRAL. Look at these sentences I’ve found:

The spiralling cost has more than doubled…
The Olympic Games cost has spiralled since 2005…
London security cost spiral…

Advanced learners of English will need to learn what words go together – collocate – naturally in English and ‘spiral’ and ‘cost’ are examples of words that go together. That makes me realise again that learners need to see new words in whole sentences, not just to read the definition of a word in a dictionary. That brings me to today’s link which is an online collocation dictionary. The GDEX Demo Dictionary allows users to enter a word, hit SEARCH, and get lots of examples of that word in sentences. But better than that, it also shows what part of speech the word is. The other day in class we were talking about the word PLUMMET. If I put plummet into the GDEX Demo Dictionary I get this page of examples of how it is used: plummet. Now with those sentences to read learners can really get a feel for how the word is used in context. Advanced learners should be bookmarking the GDEX Demo Dictionary which you can find right here!

Meanwhile back to the Olympics. One of my students today asked me how he could get some tickets! I had to laugh because I am one of the disappointed many who tried but failed to get tickets. Does anybody have any to sell??