1. Match the beginning of each idiom on the left with its ending on the right.

1 sitting on the home

2 getting your foot in the handle

3 getting out of bed on the wrong fence

4 flying off the picture

5 putting someone in the ends

6 feeling at door

7 burning the candle at both side

2. Answer these questions.

1 Is a decisive person likely to sit on the fence or come down on one side or the other?

2 If a student takes a holiday job in a big company in order to get a foot in the door, what does that suggest about the student’s plans?

3 In what circumstances do people often burn the candle at both ends?

4 Are you more likely to say that something important or something trivial is brought home to you?

5 Do you think someone would be pleased or displeased if you took a leaf out of their book?

6 If you keep someone in the picture, you are being honest to them or not?

7 How do you feel if you get out of bed on the wrong side?

8 If someone hits the roof, what sort of mood are they in?

3. Rewrite the underlined part of each sentence with an idiom.

1 It will take some time before the impact of the new legislation is fully felt by the person in the street.

2 Sophie will make herself ill if she goes on allowing herself so little sleep.

3 Before you take over the project, I’ll let you know exactly what the situation with it is.

4 The police think that DNA testing will provide the evidence necessary for providing who the murderer must have been.

5 Lim’s been in a really bad mood all day.

6 The government can’t postpone making a decision for ever.

7 Rob gets really angry at the slightest provocation these days. (Give two answers)

8 If you want to get fit, why don’t you do as Katie has done and join a gym?

4. Write sentences using six of the idioms about your own life or experience. Buildings in metaphors Buildings

Note how cement is used both to make buildings stronger and to make relationships stronger. It can be used in this way both as a noun and a verb: Let’s have a drink together to cement our partnership.

Brick wall used metaphorically means a barrier: When I tried to find out what had happened to my tax claim, I came up against a brick wall.

Ceiling can be used to suggest a limit to something: They put a ceiling of twenty thousand pounds on the redundancy payments.

The glass ceiling is a phrase used to refer to an invisible barrier that stops people, especially women, from rising to top positions at work.

Roof as a metaphor: The roof fell in on my world on the day he died. Notice how the colloquial phrase go through the roof has two different meanings. If prices goes through the roof, he or she loses their temper. Hit the roof, similarly, can be used about prices but it is far more commonly used to mean lose one’s temper: The teacher will hit the roof when she sees the mess we’ve made of this work.

As a very tall building, tower conveys an idea of distance from ordinary people. If someone lives in an ivory tower, he or she does not know about the unpleasant and ordinary things that happen in life: Academics are often criticized for living in their ivory towers.

If a person is a tower of strength, they are extremely strong (in an emotional rather than a physical sense): Our friends were a tower of strength when our house burnt down.

If a person or thing towers above something or someone else, they are either outstandingly tall or outstanding in some other positive way: Jack towers above all his classmates although he is actually one of the youngest pupils.