Rumours and gossip Lesson 202 of the everyday course of Mova's primary school: 23 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: the lesson at school .
0 A rumour is a story passed from person to person without anyone checking whether it is true. 2 Even a true piece of gossip can hurt badly: a crush, a private message, a whisper about someone in the room. 3 Online, gossip spreads even faster and stays around. 4 The wise habits: ask «How do you know that?», do not pass it on, check important news with a teacher or parent, and judge people by how they treat you yourself. 5 Example: a rumour spreads in a school in Phoenix that a scary character is coming to school. 6 Such viral scares are usually hoaxes. 7 A frightened child tells an adult, who checks and reassures her. 8 If you passed on something untrue, go back to the people you told, say it was not true, and say sorry to the person it was about. 9 Messages change each time they are passed on, so second-hand stories are often wrong. 10 Many rumours are untrue or twisted, and repeating one makes you part of the harm. 11 Asking «How do you know that?» helps you test a rumour. 12 Rumours about crushes can embarrass people badly and spread fast. 14 Online gossip spreads fast, stays around and can really hurt someone. 15 Private messages were meant for one person, and spreading them betrays trust. 16 Judge people by how they treat you, not by gossip. 17 People trust someone who keeps secrets more than someone who spreads gossip. 18 Correcting a rumour you passed on helps undo the harm. 19 Viral scary-character and «challenge» rumours are usually hoaxes, and an adult can check if there is real danger. 20 Whispering and giggling about someone who is present makes them feel left out and talked about. 21 A girl in Texas passed on a rumour that a classmate had stolen money; it was not true, but other children stopped sitting with the classmate for weeks, and she cried every morning before school. 22 A boy in Dublin shared a made-up story about a teacher in a group chat; it spread to parents, the school had to deal with it, and the boy was suspended (sent home from school for some days). 23 A rumour can spread to hundreds of people in a day online, and the truth hardly ever catches up with it. 24 Being the target of rumours can make a child lonely, anxious and afraid to go to school. ← previous Honest work at schoolnext → Jokes and teasing: when is it still funny?↑ back to Everyday This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/everyday/202-rumours-and-gossip/