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Unit 20
By Adriana Pujol and María Nunes
WHAT DOES HYPOTHESISING MEAN?
 to
speculate about something; to make
guesses about something.
Don't waste time hypothesizing about what
happened.
 to
conjecture on the origin or nature of
something.
We sat around hypothesizing on the origin of
life.
LIST OF HYPOTHESISING STRUCTURES:
 Formal
writting or speech
On the assumption (that) oily fish is good for the
heart, you should start eating it at least once a week.
Provided (that) you are careful, your health problems
should not recur.
Allowing for the fact (that) eating a lots of fruit and
vegetables is known to be healthy, what else could
explain their longevity?
Given that he has been a heavy smoker since he was
a teenager, it is not surprising that he is having
respiratory problems now.
If we were to go back to medieval times, we would
probably be rather shocked at the level of
hygiene we found.
Were we to go more deeply into the subject, we
should probably come to the conclusion that
people in the past became immune to many of
the germs that would have a devastating effect
on the papered modern body.
Had we access to the documents that we now
know were destroyed in the fire a hundred years
ago, we could be much better informed about
how things really were at the time.
 Formal
speech
If I may speculate for a moment, any new government
would seem unlikely to put much more money into the health
service whatever their election promises.
Speculating for a moment, I would like to consider what
might happen if we encouraged garlic as part of everyone’s
diet.
Let us take a hypothetical case: two twins are separated
at birth and are brought up in two very different homes, one in
which a healthy and varied diet is the norm and the other in
which the child is fed almost exclusively on junk food.
Let us imagine/consider/suppose/assume that this
house once belonged to a rich merchant, his wife and their
four young children.
Let us imagine/consider what life must have been like for
women in the past.
 Neutral
speech and informal writing
If we had more examples of women’s writing from that period,
we would be much more able to comment with confidence
on how things really wew for them then.
I wonder whether people were basically more or less stressed
in past times.
Suppose you had the opportunity to go back to any period in
the past, when would you choose?
What if we could be transported back to Ancient Greece?
Wouldn’t it be wonderful?
Just imagine having the opportunity to listen to Socrates or
Plato!
If only we could know more about how ordinary people felt in
the past!
HYPOTHESISING AND CONDITIONALS


As you may have noticed while reading the list,
most of the structures are formed with the
conditionals, since they speculate about things
which didn’t happen or the way they
happened, and therefore is very important to
know how to use them, specially the second,
third and mixed conditionals.
You should also pay attention to the verb
tenses which are used in these structures: it is
usually the past tense of modal verbs, such as
might, could, would, should, etc.
PUT IT INTO PRACTICE:
 Use
the list of hypothesising structures to
speculate about one of these topics:
•
•
Is the Universe infinite? If not, how will it end?
And why?
What would have happen if Germany didn’t
loose the Second World War?
•
How will earth be 20 years from now?
•
Other topics, use your imagination!