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Much vocabulary relates to animals and plants.
Read the following idioms and proverbs for a start.
In your group discuss what is meant by each of these sayings.
Take home those you are unsure of and see if your parents can help you.
| To have green fingers |
| To hear through the grapevine |
| To be a dog in a manger |
| To be mutton dressed up as lamb |
| To be a wolf in sheep’s clothing |
| To have goose flesh |
| To reap what one sows |
| To take a horse to water but not to be able to make it drink |
| To cast pearls before swine |
| Not to count your chickens before they have hatched |
| To know that all his geese are swans |
| To have cooked his goose |
| Not being able to say “Boo” to a goose |
| To kill the goose that lays the golden egg |
| To pluck ones goose |
| What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander |
| To be in the doghouse |
| To be as sick as a dog |
| To go to the dogs |
| To rain cats and dogs |
| To let the cat out of the bag |
| To put a cat among the pigeons |
| To be a rose among the thorns |
| To be a thorn in the flesh |
[24]
Many countries have flowers or plants as their national symbols.
Can you match the following national flowers to their country?
| C ountry | S election | |
| Lily (Fleur-de-lis) | Scotland | |
| Pomegranate | France | |
| Rose | Ireland | |
| Shamrock | Canada | |
| Thistle | England | |
| Sugar Maple | Spain |
[6]
If you could have a plant or flower to represent you, what would you choose and why would you choose that particular plant or flower?
Share your choice with the class. You can learn something about one another!
Let us learn about language!
We are going to base our language exercises on the following article from the Your Family (June 2003):
The earliest record of South African flora was made by Justus Heurnius, a Dutch missionary who collected and recorded plants in 1624 while the ship he was sailing on from Batavia to Holland took on fresh water in Cape Town.
By 1700, almost 1000 Cape plants had been recorded. One of the governors of the Cape, Ryk Tulbagh, a lover of wild flowers, was responsible for sending plants, bulbs and seeds from the Cape to Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanical expert, who devised the system by which all living things are named.
In 1772 Sir Joseph Banks, the acting director of Kew, before it became a public garden, sent Francis Masson to collect plants from South Africa. Masson sailed with Captain Cook to Cape Town, where he collected more than 400 species of plants, including seventy-nine different species of Proteas and fifty species of Cape Pelargoniums. It was Masson’s collections of Cape flora that gave Kew its reputation as a leading botanical institution.
South African plants also found their way to Australia aboard ships on their way to the ‘new colony’. These include Nerine, Gazanias, Ericas and Clivias, as well as weeds such as Oxalis and Kikuyu.
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2. Let us revise the USES (FUNCTIONS) OF THE COMMA.
You would have noticed that the writer has made use of a number of commas . See how:
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