Hypothesising

1. Hypothesising Unit 20 By Adriana Pujol and María Nunes

2. What does hypothesising mean? • to speculate about something; to make guesses about something. Don't waste time hypothesizing about what happened. • to conjecture on the origin or nature of something. We sat around hypothesizing on the origin of life.

3. List of hypothesising structures: • Formal writting or speech On the assumption (that) oily fish is good for the heart, you should start eating it at least once a week. Provided (that) you are careful, your health problems should not recur. Allowing for the fact (that) eating a lots of fruit and vegetables is known to be healthy, what else could explain their longevity? Given that he has been a heavy smoker since he was a teenager, it is not surprising that he is having respiratory problems now.

4. If we were to go back to medieval times, we would probably be rather shocked at the level of hygiene we found. Were we to go more deeply into the subject, we should probably come to the conclusion that people in the past became immune to many of the germs that would have a devastating effect on the papered modern body. Had we access to the documents that we now know were destroyed in the fire a hundred years ago, we could be much better informed about how things really were at the time.

5. Formal speech If I may speculate for a moment, any new government would seem unlikely to put much more money into the health service whatever their election promises. Speculating for a moment, I would like to consider what might happen if we encouraged garlic as part of everyone’s diet. Let us take a hypothetical case: two twins are separated at birth and are brought up in two very different homes, one in which a healthy and varied diet is the norm and the other in which the child is fed almost exclusively on junk food. Let us imagine/consider/suppose/assume that this house once belonged to a rich merchant, his wife and their four young children. Let us imagine/consider what life must have been like for women in the past.

6. Neutral speech and informal writing If we had more examples of women’s writing from that period, we would be much more able to comment with confidence on how things really wew for them then. I wonder whether people were basically more or less stressed in past times. Suppose you had the opportunity to go back to any period in the past, when would you choose? What if we could be transported back to Ancient Greece? Wouldn’t it be wonderful? Just imagine having the opportunity to listen to Socrates or Plato! If only we could know more about how ordinary people felt in the past!

7. Hypothesising and Conditionals • As you may have noticed while reading the list, most of the structures are formed with the conditionals,since they speculate about things which didn’t happen or the way they happened, and therefore is very important to know how to use them, specially the second, third and mixed conditionals. • You should also pay attention to the verb tenses which are used in these structures: it is usually the past tense of modal verbs, such as might, could, would, should, etc.

8. Put it into practice: • Use the list of hypothesising structures to speculate about one of these topics: • Is the Universe infinite? If not, how will it end? And why? • What would have happen if Germany didn’t loose the Second World War? • How will earth be 20 years from now? • Other topics, use your imagination!