The countries “visited” are Brazil, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, France, Greece, Israel, Mexico, South Africa, and Thailand. Each unit starts with a few facts about the country followed by the letter from a friend who has lived there for some time and who tells Rebecca about why he or she thinks this is a great country. Each idiom is underlined and thus clearly identified. The first exercise consists in guessing what the idioms mean and offering possible definitions. The next exercise provides examples of use of the idioms and encourages students to write their own examples in short paragraphs including the idioms. The instructions are so precise that it seems difficult to go wrong here.

In the “Mix and Match” exercise, more examples are provided. The sentences are cut into two parts, and beginnings and endings have to be matched. Unfortunately, it is always the idioms themselves that are cut, so the matching does not really have to take the context into account. All the student has to do is find the next word in the idiom. For example “Can you drum” is in the left-hand column and “up interest among the staff so we can offer English classes?” is in the right-hand column. It would have been better to cut after the idiom, thus ensuring that an idiom is matched with a context and/or structure. In the second part of this exercise, each idiom is followed by four words. Students have to choose the word that best relates to the idiom. I found an impossibility in the third sentence of the first unit, but I have not done all the exercises. This may be an isolated case.