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Inspired! Dazzling! Brilliant! The Gaelforce Dance Company gave fans of Irish culture an exquisite opportunity this September to see some of the best Irish dancing in the world.

Paper 1: Use of English

This paper consists of five parts, each very different, but all with the aim of testing your knowledge of English grammar, vocabulary and word formation.

Part 1

This is a multiple choice gap-fill exercise which involves knowing not only the meaning of words but also collocations and grammatical patterns. The extract below is the first paragraph of a typical part 1 text.

The London Tea Trade

The English language originated in Britain, of course, but who will influence the direction it is taking now, the Americans or the British?

The popularity of English in the world is indisputable. However, it isn't the most widely spoken language. Mandarin Chinese is spoken by about 70 per cent of China's one billion people, whereas English is spoken by no more than 500 million. Of course, no statistics on the spread of English are authoritative today because of changes in the world in the twilight of the last century.

Travel writer Olgierd Budrewicz took a trip to Pennsylvania for a walk down memory lane with his old friend Ed Piszek, founder of the Copernicus Foundation and the World of English.

At last the new millennium seems real. With the completion of the Human Genome Project we are finally entering the new age we all thought began on January 1 2000. For good or ill, we all will soon feel the innovations this leap in biological understanding is bringing.

The summer is here and the travel bug has been biting everyone. Roads and airports will soon be packed with vacationers, and beaches, resorts and theme parks are ready for the tourist season. But for some folks there's no fun in those places. While people might still want the same things - relaxation, adventure or love - nowadays a summer trip's got to be further, faster or just plain freakier. Vacations ain't what they used to be, writes Steve DeBretto.

For the person who has everything

Austin Powers 3: Goldmember opens in Polish cinemas on September 13. The film stars Mike Myers and Polish-American actress and rising star in Hollywood, Nina Kaczorowski. When she was in Poland recently Nina talked to journalist Monika Jaworska for The World of English. She tells us about her Polish origins, working in Hollywood, and what Tom Cruise and Ben Affleck are really like!

Why does football breed hooliganism? Looking at the nature of the phenomenon we ask whether it can ever be eradicated.

Those who read me, know my conviction that the world ... rests on a few very simple ideas ... It rests, notably ... on the idea of Fidelity." So wrote Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), the Polish-born writer whose novels in the English language have come to be regarded as some of the greatest in English literature. Born in what is now the Ukraine, Conrad grew up with the name Konrad Korzeniowski, only changing it to be easier for English tongues to pronounce. At the age of seventeen he went away to sea, and for the next twenty years the naval life with all its hardships was to be his world.