Idiomatic expressions are present in any language.
They are phrases that express ideas. These phrases are sometimes not clear from the meanings of each individual word and they should be understood as a unit.
It's important to pay attention to them when we are reading or when we are listening to English and, of course, it's also very important to try to use them when we speak.
Read the following text about two sisters and pay attention to the idiomatic expressions (typed in red colour).
Alice was a troubled girl. She was more often than not in a black mood for no particular reason. Her manners were not really polite and she
sometimes made things on purpose, just for the sake of annoying people. For example, you could be asking her to do
something until you became blue in the face, but she would ignore you
completely.
Her sister, on the other hand,
was quite the opposite. She was a very
pleasant girl who would always go the extra mile to
help others in any way she could. It was
no secret that her father felt that she was the apple of his eye. He felt so strongly for this daughter that he
usually pampered her a lot, but not her sister.
Now, Alice, of course, used to feel green with
envy every time her sister received red carpet
treatment while she didn’t.
She didn’t mind expressing her opinions directly to her father, on the
contrary she never beat around the bush to
let her father know how furious she felt for this act of discrimination, as she
called it. Her father’s preference for her
sister is annoying for her, but it’s also a blessing in disguise because
her father doesn’t expect many things from Alice. He is quite demanding with her sister though.
However, Alice loved her sister,
and she secretly admired her. She reckoned
that the two of them were very different, like apples and oranges, but she loved her sister very much and she said that
to her sister, yet not very often, just once in a blue moon.
Did you understand what each idiom meant? Check your understanding with the following quiz:
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You can also practise these idioms with this matching activity.
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