| File | Language point | Example from story | |------|----------------|---------------------| | 1A | Greetings & introductions | “Hello, what’s your name?” | | 2B | Present simple (he/she/it) | “She lives downstairs.” | | 5C | Can/can’t for ability | “I can’t do my grammar exercises.” | | 7C | Weather vocabulary | “Rainy, cloudy, windy, humid.” | | 8A | I’d like to… / Can I…? | “I’d like to speak to the manager.” | | 9A | Prepositions of time (at/in/on) | “At 10:47 PM, the Wi-Fi came back.” | | 10C | Past simple (regular/irregular) | “A truck hit a pole.” / “They sat in a circle.” |
The truth was worse. A truck had hit a telephone pole at the end of Lake Street. The super said it would be eight hours before the internet came back.
Then Carol knocked on the door. She lived in the apartment downstairs. She was holding a bag of pretzels and a worn copy of American English File 1 . “I saw the truck hit the pole. I figured you guys were dying of boredom.”
It was a Tuesday evening in October. The kind of gray evening where the vocabulary in File 7C (“The weather”) comes to life: *cloudy, rainy, windy, humid—*all at once.
“The panic,” Jenny said, “is that I can’t do my online grammar exercises. I can’t listen to the File 9 listening track—‘What time does the train leave?’ I can’t even check the meaning of ‘borrow’ vs. ‘lend.’ I’m going to fail.”
Rob laughed. “You’re not going to fail. You know more English than most people born here.”
