The Newsstand
Issue — August 2026
In this issue
24 lessonsA2 — Elementary
6 lessons- Harvest Time: Fruits of Summer Across the countryside, farmers work long days to bring tomatoes, peaches and corn from the field to your table.
- Camping Under the Stars A simple guide to tents, campfires, and your first night in nature.
- Festivals for Everyone A family-friendly guide to August celebrations around the world
- Fruit and Vegetable Words From apple to zucchini — the food words you use every day.
- Countable and Uncountable: Some Rice, Many Apples Why you can count apples but not rice — quantifiers made clear.
- Quiz: What's on Your Plate? Foods of the world — a tasty vocabulary quiz.
B1 — Intermediate
6 lessons- Edinburgh Fringe: The Biggest Arts Show on Earth Every August, the Scottish capital becomes the world's stage. Here is how the Fringe works and who wins.
- Notting Hill Carnival: A Caribbean Party in London Every August, two million people fill the streets of west London for Europe's biggest street carnival.
- Working Holidays: Trading Your Desk for the World A B1 culture feature on voluntourism — picking grapes, teaching abroad, and the debates behind the boom
- Music to Your Ears: 13 Musical English Idioms From facing the music to playing it by ear, English is full of colourful expressions borrowed from the world of music.
- First and Second Conditional If it rains vs If it rained — real and unreal futures explained.
- Quiz: Festival Cities Discover Edinburgh, Rio, and Munich — and test what you know about the world's most exciting celebrations.
B2 — Upper Intermediate
6 lessons- Fighting Fire with Fire: The New Science of Wildfire Management From goat herds to AI cameras, communities are using creative tools to stay ahead of dangerous blazes.
- Farms in the City: Vertical Farming Grows Up Can stacked warehouses full of LEDs really feed the world's urban populations?
- Logging Off to Live On: The Rise of the Digital Detox Movement From phone-free holidays to dumb phones and screen sabbaths, a growing number of people are choosing to disconnect — and rediscover the world around them.
- Describing Change: Transform, Shift, Evolve The vocabulary you need to talk about how things change — whether it happens overnight or over decades.
- Reported Speech: Questions and Commands Turn direct questions and imperatives into smooth, natural reported forms.
- Quiz: Food Then and Now From fermentation to factory farms — a food history quiz.
C1 — Advanced
6 lessons- The Antibiotic Crisis: Medicine's Ticking Clock As superbugs outpace new drugs, a silent pandemic threatens to undo a century of medical progress.
- Rare Earths: The Metals That Run the World Seventeen obscure elements sit at the centre of a new global power struggle — from your phone to a missile's guidance system.
- Nostalgia: Why We Long for the Past From a 17th-century disease to a 21st-century marketing tool — the strange psychology of looking back
- Legal English: Ordinary Words, Legal Meanings Why 'consideration' isn't a kind thought, and 'party' isn't just a celebration.
- Participle Clauses: Elegant Compression How to compress complex ideas into flowing prose using present, past, and perfect participles.
- Quiz: Science That Shapes Society Antibiotics, chips, and climate — test your grasp of the discoveries and dilemmas that define modern life.