Looooooong Sentences (with the occasional mistake)
Following are some of the sentences you wrote in class two weeks ago. You'll notice that some words or groups of words are highlighted in blue or in red. Blue means there is a vocabulary or spelling problem. Guess what the correct word would be and then click on the blue block to see the answer. Red means there might be a comma problem - you need to decide if the sentence is correct as it is, or if it is a comma splice or if it is a fused sentence. Click on the red block to see the answer. Obviously, this is a self-checking exercise - there is nothing to turn in to me. You may work together if you prefer. By the way, the longest closest-to-completely correct sentence in the Tuesday group had 204 words. In the Wednesday group, the longest completely correct sentence had 162 words and the longest very-nearly-correct sentence had 273 words.
1. Talking about such nice and wonderful exercises given to us by our extremely kind and charming teacher, Miss Sara (without an "h", of course) B. Young, who came all the way across the big Atlantic ocean from the beautiful and famous state of Ohio, which is situated in the great and absolutely beloved United States of America, where the biggest example of intelligence, Mr. George W. Bush, rules the country with wisdom and sensibility and which is, of course, the only country of liberty and freedom in the world, we must kindly admit that it is indeed definitely not easy to build such a very long, long sentence which should be written down in an interesting and informing way, so that everybody could easily understand it and read it with great pleasure, and which should be of outrageous creativity and imagination, no matter if it makes sense or not, in order to fascinate the potential reader, like Virginia Woolf already tried to do with her novels and essays - although you could object that she didn't reach that goal - as a written text should always be a kind of communication between the author, in this case three brilliant and intelligent students from the university of Giessen, who will all three have a prosperous and exciting future, and the reader, who is in this case the already mentioned fine young lady from the Ohio State University in Columbus (that interesting city), because this kind of communication is of extreme importance for the human being in general, whether you regard it from the psychological or the linguistic aspect.
2. There are many ways to get from the train station to the computer lab in the main library of Giessen University: either one can take the bus number two, which is not only late every morning but also very packed at nine o'clock but at least free if you did not throw away your semester ticket, and which will take you to Graudenzer Strasse from where you have to walk the last couple of hundred meters which is actually not a problem, since it is a nice walk and there are no cars that try to kill you in the morning, or if you are lazy you just take the tiny and very dirty bus number 10 that starts off from Friedensstrasse, which you can get to by taking the old and not very stable pedestrian bridge crossing the railroad tracks, and goes directly to the Rathenaustrasse bus stop that is situated exactly in the middle of Phil I and Phil II.
3. The longest sentence of the whole world contains an incredible exciting story about an old man, known as Peter James Christopher Duke of Cornwall the Second, who led an amazing life, especially during the First World War, because his dangerous job was to report on the cruellnesses on the battle field, therefore many people admired him for his courage and his authentic way of writing and many boys decided, because of Peter James Christopher Duke of Cornwall the Second, to also become such great writers who can depict the adventures of every-day-life during the First World War - but in fact that was not the only thing the Duke was famous for, indeed he was famous for cooking, especially for a meal called 'The Duke's Best' which was a hot spicy soup containing potatoes, mushrooms and a secret spice from Asia.
4. Old MacDonald, who lives happily and satisfied on a big old farm in the southern part of the State of Ohio, possessing lots of old and also new agricultural machines and tools and lots of animals, such as one loudly barking dog with sharp but false plastic teeth who is almost as old as MacDonald himself; five spotted, little cute cats who are hungry all day and want to do nothing except drink fresh milk and hunt all the 500 mice living in the three barns of the farm; many grunting dirty pigs; 200 healthy looking cows, which luckily are not yet infected with the Mad Cow disease; several nice, wooly sheep, mostly white ones, but some black ones as well, whose wool is sold to the people in the neighborhood; many different fish species in a deep and beautiful pond, with stones around it and nice clear water and flowers bloomingnext to it and twenty fat, white feathered chickens, some of them with black and brown spots on their heads, but the most important thing for Old MacDonald is his one and only sweet and witty wife, together with his four beloved children, Thomas, the youngest one, who is three years old, Sandy, aged 7, Tim, who is 12 years old and finally Amanda, who is 16 years already and in love with another farmer, who she is going to marry pretty soon, so that both of the farms can merge in the near future and become an even more successful farm business for both of the families so that Old MacDonald and his wife can spend the rest of their life carefree.
5. To have a healthy body you should pay attention to your eating habits, or you might even have to change them if you are a kind of junk food freak (many doctors agree to that even if they often have different opinions about how to stay healthy), but to eat in a healthy way isn't as easy as it sounds because every food has advantages and disadvantages which are only known by specialists, or maybe you can find them in numerous overexpensive books which advertise very expensive diet products which are hard to find in shops and take a lot of time to prepare this diet meals and this gives us a lot of reasons to critizise all the people who sell those diet products to make money.
6. A lot of people think that the weather in Germany is better than in England but, as you can see today, when you have a look out of the window you can quickly notice that our weather here in Germany is almost as bad as in Great Britain, nevertheless there are some hot and sunny days during summer time so that you may get the feeling to be in the Caribbean Sea but it only happens every third year, meanwhile the German autumn makes you feel as you were in England like we said before, but even in autumn there are some beautiful days where you can go for a walk in the large German forests, which are very colourful, and enjoy the fresh and clear air and atmosphere at that time of the year and if you get up early enough in the morning you get the impression that a completely fantastic new world is coming out of the fog that is covering the whole environment, but in winter time nature is also amazing, especially when you think of the icy white landscape with snowflakes falling down from big and grey winter clouds and you can only think about building a snowman and do not feel bad if it is melting in spring, what is the best season for a lot of people all over the world.
7. Knowing that you have to give a presentation for one of the various classes at university is always combined with a good and intensive preparation which involves in most cases not only writing endless paragraphs on the topic you have chosen, but also researching several useful internet search engines like Google, All The Web, Lycos, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista and several other helpful tools, which usually gives you an endless list of links and useful documents which should actually help you find information required for working out your presentation, but most of the time you have more work trying to filter the useful from the useless information, so that you actually spend more time evaluating search results than if you had gone straight to the library in order to get specific books and literature related to your main topic only to find out that the photocopier in the english department library is broken again so that you go back to the first alternative on getting your information from the internet and printing it out at home where you have enough time and patience to decide what you want to use and what you want to leave out of your presentation.
8. The longest sentence that was ever written on a computer in the Computer Leseraum in the University Library of the Justus - Liebig - University in the romantic and fascinating and impressive City of Giessen in the Philosophikum I, located at Otto - Behagel - Street 10b, resulted out of a task given by the enthusiastic and marvelous english - lecturer Sara B. Young in her writing - class in the time from 12 am to 2 am, which is usually the lunch break time where you have time to go to the cafeteria and have a very good tasting meal which is very cheap for students of the university but more expensive for visitors, who have to pay 1,10 Euros more if they do not have a student ID, and was carried out by the students Didem Deveceken from Dillenburg and studying new foreign languages and the siblings Mirjam Haas and Julian Haas who are both going to be teachers and were both born in Giessen and lived in Gladenbach.
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