CAN, COULD, BE ABLE TO, MANAGE TO
1. Read the text and complete with can, could, be able to, manage to. Put in the gaps the correct word
from the box.
circumstance sweat flowerpots land bushels crisis problems relatives’ trouble eggplant
Laundromat Creativity in Crisis
How creative can we be, and how much be able to we work without fear as we enter into crisis, as pain
comes into our lives? This becomes a very important question. Can we be creative when trouble comes?
My Great-Aunt Lucy and her friend Ruby came over from Italy. They had some problems when they came,
because in Italy they were farmers and they had land, and they grew their own food. But when they came to
America, they had to live with flowerpots in the city, they could not continue planting in their new home,
where it was crowded and there wasn’t land. But they can get some bushels, and they planted eggplant,
they planted tomatoes, they planted what they could. And at the end of the summer they had three bushels
of eggplant. But they couldn´t get the heavy crockery they needed to salt and sweat and drain the eggplant.
So, they can take the__________ three to the laundromat, and they put it on a spin/rinse cycle. They
always said “we will manage to find a solution to our problems”
When you find yourself in a circumstance where it is not as you hoped and not as you planned, and you
still want to go ahead and carry on with your work, your response to the crisis—and your ability to bring
Light into it—is going to be very important. You can be sure that we will be able to get over our problem.
We have to try, what could go wrong?
2. Work in pairs, talk with your partner about a hard situation in your life and tell him what the
problem was and what you did for get over it. After write the story, you have to use could, be able to
and manage to (Remember, you can also use the past form).
