Page 142 - Grasp English B1+ (Student Book)

11 Robotics

Grammar 1 Defining/Non-defining relative clauses

A. Read the passage and answer the questions.

1. Which sentences would be grammatically correct if we remove
the relative clause?
Hint: look for an Italian couple, an owner, a tortoise and a
Mercedes car.
2. Read the sentences without those clauses. Do they make sense?
3. What’s the difference in meaning between these two sentences?
The owner, who has a loud voice, shouts at the dogs to be quiet.
The owner who has a loud voice shouts at the dogs to be quiet.

My neighbours

The people that live in my street are very interesting.

Rosa and Stefano, who came from Italy thirty years ago, have the large house on the corner. They
grow lots of fruit and vegetables that they share with all the neighbours.

Next door is a young man who keeps animals: two cats, a dog, a tortoise, three rabbits and a
parrot. Sometimes it can be noisy because the parrot screeches at the dogs, which then bark at
the cat. The owner, who has a loud voice, shouts at the dogs to be quiet. Meanwhile, the tortoise,
which likes my lettuces, often escapes into my garden where he eats my plants. I pick him up and
drop him back over the fence that divides our gardens when the owner’s not looking.
And then there’s the mysterious neighbour whose name no one knows. His dark blue Mercedes,
which he polishes every day, sits in front of his house. Once I saw some children accidentally hit
his car with their ball when they were playing in the street. Instead of being angry, the man joined
them for a game of football, which surprised everybody!

B. Look at these sentences about Alan Turing. In which sentence is the information in bold essential?

1. Alan Turing, who was born in 1912, was a British mathematician and computer scientist.
2. In the 1950s, he developed a test which could assess whether a computer could pass for a human.
3. Alan Turing helped to break the Enigma Code at Bletchley Park, where secret work to break German
coded messages was done.
4. Benedict Cumberbatch played Turing in the 2014 film The Imitation Game, which focuses on Turing’s
work as a codebreaker in World War II.

C. Write defining or non-defining to complete the rules.
1. a) In relative clauses, the information introduced in the clause is essential.

b) In relative clauses, we can miss out the information in the clause without affecting
the sentence.

2. a) In relative clauses, we use commas to separate the information.
b) In relative clauses, we don’t use commas.
3. a) In relative clauses, we can use any relative pronoun (that, which, who, where,
when, whose).
b) In relative clauses, we don’t use that.

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