Quiz playing is a wonderful way to increase your knowledge of English as a Second Language. Remember that all of our ESL quizzes have titles that are both friendly and technical at the same time… In the case of this quiz you might like to tell your friends about “Spelling Bee” but no doubt your teachers will talk about the “Homophones quiz”! If you hear a technical term and you want to find a quiz about the subject then just look through the list of quiz titles until you find what you need.
It can be remarkable sometimes, what versatile use English makes of just 26 letters to represent its whole variety of sounds. Sometimes two very different words will sound alike but not look alike; while another pair might look alike, yet sound different. This is called a homophone.
See how you get on with these homophones!
In order: 'real' is not the same as 'reel' (which is a cylindrical container onto which you would wind-in a wire or thread, such as fishing-line, recording tape or film, or string, knitting-wool, thread etc.). In the days before television, people who went to the cinema would see a 'newsreel', i.e. one reel full of film that would show them the latest news as the film un-wound and passed through the projector. This word ('reel') also has further uses, e.g. a drunken person may be 'reeling about' (moving in an un-coordinated way), or someone with a lot of knowledge may 'reel off' a series of facts, such as the names and dates of all the Kings and Queens of England. (The image, here, is like of a whole 'string' or 'chain' of information coming off a reel.)
Christmas is an established religious festival, so starts with a capital letter, and (in honour of Christ of course) has a T in the middle ~ which tends not to be clearly pronounced when people wish one another a 'happy Chris-mas'.
Conifers are not supposed to drop their needles, as deciduous trees do with their leaves in autumn (see the earlier Question about Burnham Beeches!). But they may ~ just about ~ be said to 'leave their leaves'; 'leaves' in the latter sense, being the slightly irregular plural of 'leaf' (like 'knife / knives', 'shelf / shelves' etc.)