This lesson is based on a TED Talk by the late professor Hans Rosling, Swedish pop-star statistician.
This worksheet will be accessible to students at level A2+ and above. As the first activity introduces potentially new (key)words, and the speaker speaks clearly using a very straight-forward presentation technique, your lower-level learners will probably be able to watch the talk without subtitles.
Depending on your students’ English level, as well as their ability to focus, you might choose to play the video in chunks or in one go.
If you go for a series of shorter clips, it’s useful to have the transcript of the talk at hand (available on the TED Talk site) and pause after each paragraph (or two in some cases). I find it very helpful to play videos in short chunks to students around B1, as otherwise they tend to drift away as soon as they come across too many unknown words in longer clips. When you pause ask your class relevant questions regarding the content of each clip. You can simply have them repeat in their own words what they’ve understood or use the questions in TASK II.
As a follow-up in your next class, you might want to do a grammar revision (tenses) using the opening paragraph from the transcript of the talk. Students will encounter a variety of tenses and uses there. Once your students are done with the worksheet below, you can get them to do some more mixed-tenses activities, such as a gap-fill exercise from your regular course book.