- Communicative Objective: Develop the ability to make careful deductions about past events, evaluate possible causes, express varying degrees of certainty, and distinguish evidence-based conclusions from speculation.
- 5 Core Functional Sentences:
- The sudden decline may have resulted from a combination of weaker demand and rising production costs.
- They cannot have anticipated the scale of the public reaction when the decision was originally announced.
- Given the information available at the time, the managers might reasonably have assumed that the risk was minimal.
- Had the warning signs been recognized earlier, the situation could perhaps have been prevented.
- It would appear that several contributing factors were involved rather than any single identifiable cause.
- Grammar Focus: Modal verbs of past probability and speculation, perfect modal constructions, past passive forms, third conditional inversion, and impersonal reporting structures.
- Vocabulary Focus: anticipate, minimal, contributing, identifiable, decline
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Speculating About Past Events and Causes
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