Tricky Words in this week's OVI

English tenses with future meanings - revision. There are examples in this week's extracts of the five tenses used quite normally in English to say something about the future. In the Summer Games piece, "Further competitions get under way on Friday" means that there is a fixed program for the competitions, and "The golfers meet on the greens …" suggests that they have no choice about it, if they want to take part. "52 people are entering the badminton tournament" indicates that they have made personal arrangements to take part, so for them it's almost certain to happen. "From Sept 4 - 6 … sportspeople … will be meeting" is an example of real future tense, because everything is prepared for a specific future date.

Andy's Wordshop

The next example is from the Metal Inspirations piece: "The designers' works are going to serve a good cause", where "going to" gives a strong sense of it really happening for sure, with no discussion and no doubt. Back to the Games, the last example is "sportsgrounds where they will compete in eleven sporting disciplines", which expresses personal expectation that it will happen. Another way of putting it would be "… where they are expected to compete", or "… where we believe they will compete", which is much weaker than saying "going to". The simple future tense is "will be", as in "interested buyers will be able to bid for them", which translates simply as "si ich budú môcť vydražiť", with no special sense of arrangement, specific time or absence of doubt.