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EXERCISES ON PERSONAL PRONOUNS AND VERB TO BE
Name: _________________________________. Date: _______________.
I. Complete the following sentences using Personal Pronouns. (5
marks)
1. ___________________ is calculating a budget for a new project. (Daniel)
2. ___________________ are working for a big construction company. (Lisa
and Joseph)
3. ___________________ is not working well today. (This computer)
4. ___________________ cleans the office every day. (Lynn)
5. ___________________ supervised my job yesterday. (The manager)
6. ___________________ is going well! (The business process)
7. ___________________ are happy because the business goals are being
reached. (The boss and I)
8. ___________________ is one of the main elements to make the
employees work efficiently. (Motivation)
9. ___________________ are being carried out as you ordered. (The plans)
10.___________________ said the businessman will need millions of dollars
to execute the work. (The project manager)
II. Complete the following sentences using the verb to be forms. (5
marks)
1. The civil engineer ____________ in his office right now.
2. The schedules ____________ very tight. We don’t have time to eat.
3. ____________ the time limit for the execution of this work three
months?
4. The architects ____________ checking the structures whether they
were well designed or not. (not)
5. ____________ Matthew and you responsible for this damage caused to
the company?
6. My cousin and I ____________ going to travel to Lima to work in a
small construction project.
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7. ____________ the manager evaluating the employees because we have
had a lot of problems lately?
8. Mark ____________ making the workmen start the building work on
time. (not)
9. ____________ you from Chiclayo?
10.The builders ____________ able to do topographical surveys. (not)
III. Replace the nouns in black by a personal pronoun. Then, circle all the verb
to be forms you find in the following text. (10 marks)
The History of Building Construction
Primitive building: the Stone Age
The hunter-gatherers of the late Stone Age, who moved about a wide area in search of food,
built the earliest temporary shelters that appear in the archaeological record. Excavations at a
number of sites in Europe dated to before 12,000 BCE show circular rings of stones that are
believed to have formed part of such shelters. They may have braced crude huts made of
wooden poles or have weighted down the walls of tents made of animal skins, presumably
supported by central poles.
A tent illustrates the basic elements of environmental control that are the concern of building
construction. The tent creates a membrane to shed rain and snow; cold water on the human
skin absorbs body heat. The membrane reduces wind speed as well; air over the human skin
also promotes heat loss. It controls transfer by keeping out the hot rays of the sun and
confining heated air in cold weather. It also blocks out light and provides visual privacy. The
membrane must be supported against the forces of gravity and wind; a structure is necessary.
Membranes of hides are strong in tension (stresses imposed by stretching forces), but poles
must be added to take compression (stresses imposed by compacting forces). Indeed, much of
the history
of building construction is the search for more sophisticated solutions to the same basic
problems that the tent was set out to solve. The tent has continued in use to the present. The
Saudi Arabian goats’ hair tent, the Mongolian yurt with its collapsible wooden frame and felt
coverings, and the American Indian tepee with its multiple pole supports and double membrane
are more refined and elegant descendants of the crude shelters of the early hunter-gatherers.
The agricultural revolution, dated to about 10,000 BCE, gave a major impetus to building
construction. People no longer traveled in search of game or followed their herds but stayed in
one place to tend their fields. Dwellings began to be more permanent. Archaeological records
are scanty, but in the Middle East are found the remains of whole villages of round dwellings
called tholoi, whose walls are made of packed clay; all traces of roofs have disappeared. In
Europe tholoi were built of dry-laid stone with domed roofs; there are still surviving examples
(of more recent construction) of these beehive structures in the Alps. In later Middle Eastern
tholoi, a rectangular antechamber or entrance hall appeared, attached to the main circular
chamber—the first examples of the rectangular plan form in building. Still later the circular form
was dropped in favor of the rectangle as dwellings were divided into more rooms and more
dwellings were placed together in settlements. The tholoi marked an important step in the
search for durability; they were the beginning of masonry construction.
Evidence of composite building construction of clay and wood, the so-called wattle-and-
daub method, is also found in Europe and the Middle East. The walls were made of small
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saplings or reeds, which were easy to cut with stone tools. They were driven into the ground,
tied together laterally with vegetable fibers, and then plastered over with wet clay to give added
rigidity and weatherproofing. The roofs have not survived, but the structures were probably
covered with crude thatch or bundled reeds. Both round and rectangular forms are found,
usually with central hearths.
Heavier timber buildings also appeared in Neolithic (New Stone Age) cultures, although the
difficulties of cutting large trees with stone tools limited the use of sizable timbers to frames.
These frames were usually rectangular in plan, with a central row of columns to support
a ridgepole and matching rows of columns along the long walls; rafters were run from the
ridgepole to the wall beams. The lateral stability of the frame was achieved by burying the
columns deep in the ground; the ridgepole and rafters were then tied to the columns with
vegetable fibers. The usual roofing material was thatch: dried grasses or reeds tied together in
small bundles, which in turn were tied in an overlapping pattern to the light wooden poles that
spanned between the rafters. Horizontal thatched roofs leak rain badly, but, if they are placed at
the proper angle, the rainwater runs off before it has time to soak through. Primitive builders
soon determined the roof pitch that would shed the water but not the thatch. Many types of infill
were used in the walls of these frame houses, including clay, wattle and daub, tree bark
(favored by American Woodland Indians), and thatch. In Polynesia and Indonesia, where such
houses are still built, they are raised above the ground on stilts for security and dryness; the
roofing is often made of leaves and the walls are largely open to allow air movement for natural
cooling. Another variation of the frame was found in Egypt and the Middle East, where timbers
were substituted for bundles of reeds.
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