Follow up

Work with a partner. Write a similar dialogue about yourself.

LESSON 3

FAMILY TIES

VOCABULARY AND READING

1 You are going to read a passage about family ties. Before reading look at the box and guess the meaning of the following words.

extended family in-laws nephew niece generation nuclear family divorce single parent family blended family

2 Read and listen to the text and find if your guesses were correct.

There have been great changes in the make-up of families over the last 100 years. In the past, parents, their children, and their children's children often lived together in an extended family. In some places, this extended family even included relatives by marriage, called in-laws, as well as the sons and daughters of brothers and sisters, in other words, nephews and nieces.

Nowadays, in many countries, the extended family is no longer very common. Instead only two generations, parents and children, live together. This is called a nuclear family. Even the nuclear family is becoming less common in the United States, where because of factors such as divorce, the ending of the marriage, there are an increasing number of single parent families, or families with only a mother or only a father. In addition, another kind of family called a blended family is appearing. This is when two people who have been married and have children remarry, and both groups of children live together.