IELTS course - ESOL centre



left250002514600IELTS course900007300IELTS courserighttopUNIT 1ESOLcentre.ukDistance Learning ProviderReading40000100000UNIT 1ESOLcentre.ukDistance Learning ProviderReadingIELTS (International English Language Testing System)Unit 1Academic and General Training Reading testsOverview The test takes 60 min, it consists of 40 questions based on 3 (academic) or 5-6 (general) reading texts with total of 2150 words.The number and type of texts are different in the Academic and General training reading tests, but the reading skills that candidates need and the types of tasks they have to do are mainly the same, so the advice and tasks in Units 1 will be useful whether you are preparing for the Academic or General training reading test. You will need to write all your answers on the answer sheet provided, as the examiners will not look at the question papers. You must do this within the 60 minutes as you are not given time at the end of the test to transfer your answers. All answers must be written in pencil.-40005019367500 Common problems students have:?Students don’t read carefully enough so they get the wrong meaning.Students can’t pick out the key facts from a text.Students are used to reading things like websites and magazines but not academic articles.Students find it really difficult to pick out the main ideas.Students can never tell what the writer thinks about something.Students always start reading a text straightaway, instead of looking at the headings and pictures first to help them understand the text.Students keep stopping to look up words in a dictionary.Students take too long to read a text. You will not be allowed to use a dictionary at the test. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Important informationReading skills?These are the seven reading skills.1?? Previewing a text?means looking at things like the heading and layout of a text to get an idea of what the text is about before starting to read. For instance, before reading an article in a newspaper, we look at the headline and/or the picture so we have an idea of what it’s about, and can decide whether we want to read it. We know, for instance, that it is a newspaper article rather than an advert by the way it looks.Previewing is an important skill because it helps us to anticipate the content and this makes it easier to understand the text.2?? Predicting content and structure?involves using your knowledge of the topic of the text to guess what it’s going to be about. For instance, if you see an advert for a car, you can guess that the purpose of the text will be to sell the car and that there is likely to be vocabulary related to cars.Predicting is an important reading skill because we can make more sense of a text if we use what we know already about the topic.3?? Skimming for main ideas?means reading a text quite quickly for a general idea of the overall topic. When we do this, we are looking for main ideas rather than specific details. For instance, we might skim a review of a film to get a general idea of what it’s about before deciding whether to go and see it.Skimming is an important skill because if our purpose is to get a general idea about something, we don’t need to read the text carefully. In life we often don’t have time to read everything in detail!4?? Scanning to find key information?also involves reading a text quite quickly, but we use this reading skill when we want to find a particular fact. For instance, we might scan a TV guide to find out what time a particular program is on.Scanning is an important skill that we use every day to find out facts such as times, dates or places.5?? Intensive reading?or reading for detail means careful study of a text or part of a text. We do this when all the content is important. For instance, if you bought a new computer and you wanted to know how it worked, you would need to read the instructions carefully.We also read a text intensively when we need to understand exactly what the writer means, or to find out more details. For instance, having skimmed a film review for a general idea of what it’s about, you might read the review again, this time intensively, to find out details of the plot.Intensive reading is an important skill because we often have to read things very carefully to understand exactly what the writer is saying.6?? Guessing words from context. A good reader will sometimes be able to work out the meaning of a word by using the context?provided by the text and their knowledge of the world, rather than having to look the word up in a dictionary.?For instance, if you were reading a car manual and you came across a part of the engine you didn’t know, you might be able to work out what it is from the description of what it does.Guessing words from context is not always easy for learners, but it is an important skill that can sometimes help us to understand a text even if it contains unknown words.7?? Understanding opinion and attitude?means understanding what the writer is thinking or feeling, even when this is not directly stated. For instance, if someone on holiday wrote in an email, ‘I wish didn’t have to leave tomorrow,’ you would understand that the person was having a good time.Understanding attitude and opinion is an important reading skill because writers often do not state directly what they are thinking or feeling. Tasks in the reading testHere are the different types of questions:Task type 1 – Multiple choiceTask type 2 – Identifying informationTask type 3 – Identifying writer’s views/claimTask type 4 – Matching informationTask type 5 – Matching headingsTask type 6 – Matching featuresTask type 7 – Matching sentence endingsTask type 8 – Sentence completionTask type 9 – Summary, note, table, flow-chart completion ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?Task type 10 – Diagram label completionTask type 11 – Short-answer questions(Some) Types of textsA?newspaper article?is written for a general audience and may have short paragraphs, simple structures and informal language. The writer will want to encourage readers to read it and so may start with an amusing headline or a question to get them interested. The question will tell the reader what the text is going to be about.A?report?is a formal text and may contain complex grammatical forms or statistics. It may be organised so that each paragraph deals with a certain aspect of the topic.In a?historical account, the information is likely to be organised in chronological order.A?description of a process?will probably contain a lot of passive structures and be organised according to the order of the stages.In the Matching headings tasks candidates are given a list of headings and have to choose the best one for each paragraph or section of the text. The list of headings always comes before the text and there are always more headings than paragraphs.Having used their previewing and predicting skills to look at the heading of the text, if there is one, and the first paragraph, it is a good idea to read through the possible headings. This will give you more of an idea about how the text will develop and it will focus your mind on the main ideas that you have to look for. This is why the list of headings comes before the text.The important thing to note is that each heading will capture the main idea of the paragraph rather than focusing on one particular detail. So when you start reading the text, you will be skimming the text to find the main idea in each paragraph.Aims:to help students develop previewing and predicting skillsto help students read for main ideas (skimming)to introduce students to the Matching headings taskMatching Headings Task. (Academic IELTS)Foals as pets.Domestication of horses saved them from extinction.Ancient species.‘Domestication’- Interpretations and definitions.The uses of horses.Horses- symbols of power.Evidence about the domestication of horses.Wild or domesticated?Task: Read the text below:Domestication of the horseFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaA number of hypotheses exist on many of the key issues regarding the?domestication of the horse. Although?horses?appeared in Paleolithic?cave art?as early as 30,000 BCE, these were truly wild horses and were probably hunted for?meat. How and when horses became?domesticated?is disputed. The clearest evidence of early use of the horse as a means of?transport?is from?chariot?burials dated c. 2000 BCE. However, an increasing amount of evidence supports the hypothesis that horses were domesticated in the Eurasian Steppes?approximately 4000–3500 BCE.?Recent discoveries in the context of the? HYPERLINK "" \o "Botai culture" Botai culture?suggest that Botai settlements in the?Akmola Province?of?Kazakhstan?are the location of the earliest domestication of the horse. The date of the domestication of the horse depends to some degree upon the definition of "domestication". Some zoologists define "domestication" as human control over breeding, which can be detected in ancient skeletal samples by changes in the size and variability of ancient horse populations. Other researchers look at broader evidence, including skeletal and dental evidence of working activity; weapons, art, and spiritual artifacts; and lifestyle patterns of human cultures. There is also evidence that horses were kept as meat animals prior to being trained as?working animals.Attempts to date domestication by genetic study or analysis of physical remains rests on the assumption that there was a separation of the?genotypes?of domesticated and the wild populations. Such a separation appears to have taken place, but dates based on such methods can only produce an estimate of the latest possible date for domestication without excluding the possibility of an unknown period of earlier gene-flow between wild and domestic populations (which will occur naturally as long as the domesticated population is kept within the habitat of the wild population). Further, all modern horse populations retain the ability to revert to a?feral state, and all?feral horses?are of domestic types; that is, they descend from ancestors that escaped from captivity.Whether one adopts the narrower zoological definition of domestication or the broader cultural definition that rests on an array of zoological and archaeological evidence affects the time frame chosen for domestication of the horse. The date of 4000 BCE is based on evidence that includes the appearance of dental pathologies associated with bitting, changes in butchering practices, changes in human economies and settlement patterns, the depiction of horses as symbols of power in?artifacts, and the appearance of horse bones in human graves.?On the other hand, measurable changes in size and increases in variability associated with domestication occurred later, about 2500–2000 BCE, as seen in horse remains found at the site of Csepel-Haros in?Hungary, a settlement of the?Bell Beaker culture. Regardless of the specific date of domestication, use of horses spread rapidly across?Eurasia?for transportation,?agricultural work?and?warfare. Horses and?mules?in agriculture used a?breastplate?type harness or a?yoke?more suitable for?oxen, which was not as efficient at utilizing the full strength of the animals as the later-invented padded?horse collar that arose several millennia later in western Europe.Methods of domesticationEquidae?died out in the?Western Hemisphere?at the end of the last?Ice Age. A question raised is why and how horses avoided this fate on the Eurasian continent. It has been theorized that domestication saved the species.?While the environmental conditions for equine survival in Europe were somewhat more favorable in Eurasia than in the Americas, the same stressors that led to extinction for the?Mammoth?did have an impact on horses. Thus, some time after 8000 BCE, the approximate date of extinction in the Americas, humans in Eurasia may have begun to keep horses as a?livestock?food source, and by keeping them in captivity, may have helped to preserve the species.?Horses also fit the?six core criteria for livestock domestication, and thus, it could be argued, "chose" to live in close proximity to humans.One model of horse domestication starts with individual?foals?being kept as pets while the adult horses were slaughtered for meat. Foals are relatively small and easy to handle. Horses?behave?as herd animals and need companionship to thrive. Both historic and modern data shows that foals can and will bond to humans and other domestic animals to meet their social needs. Thus domestication may have started with young horses being repeatedly made into pets over time, preceding the great discovery that these pets could be ridden or otherwise put to work.However, there is disagreement over the definition of the term?domestication. One interpretation of?domestication?is that it must include physiological changes associated with being?selectively bred?in captivity, and not merely "tamed." It has been noted that traditional peoples worldwide (both hunter-gatherers and?horticulturists) routinely tame individuals from wild species, typically by hand-rearing infants whose parents have been killed, and these animals are not necessarily "domesticated."On the other hand, some researchers look to examples from historical times to hypothesize how domestication occurred. For example, while?Native American?cultures captured and rode horses from the 16th century on, most tribes did not exert significant control over their breeding, thus their horses developed a?genotype?and?phenotype?adapted to the uses and climatological conditions in which they were kept, making them more of a?landrace?than a planned ‘Most scholars believe it was here that people domesticated the horse’.?The meaning of?domesticate?(to bring animals or plants under human control in order to provide food, power or companionship).76200-79375000Discuss which of the following you think the text is:a ???An article about increased use of horses as pets.b??? A historical account of the relationship between man and horse.c????A personal complaint about the cruel treatment of horses. Write the paragraph headings:Foals as pets.Domestication of horses saved them from extinction.Ancient species.‘Domestication’- Interpretations and definitions.The uses of horses.Horses- symbols of power.Evidence about the domestication of horses.Wild or domesticated?Choose one of the headings to match each paragraph of the text. You have two minutes to read through the headings and try to predict what information each paragraph will contain. You have just carried out a number of predicting and previewing activities. You have used:the headingthe first paragraphthe paragraph headings. A time limit of ten minutes is set so that you read quickly for the main idea in each paragraph.How did you do????Can you explain your answers?Suggested answers:C 5. EG 6. BH 7. AF 8. D?TaskGeneral Training Reading sample task – Sentence completionRead the text below and complete the sentences that follow.[Note: This is an extract from a General Training Reading text on the subject of understanding bee behaviour. The text preceding this extract described Karl von Frisch's experiments and his conclusions about two bee dances.] At first, von Frisch thought the bees were responding only to the scent of the food. But what did the third dance mean? And if bees were responding only to the scent, how could they also ‘sniff down’ food hundreds of metres away from the hive*, food which was sometimes downwind? On a hunch, he started gradually moving the feeding dish further and further away and noticed as he did so that the dances of the returning scout bees also started changing. If he placed the feeding dish over nine metres away, the second type of dance, the sickle version, came into play. But once he moved it past 36 metres, the scouts would then start dancing the third, quite different, waggle dance. The measurement of the actual distance too, he concluded, was precise. For example, a feeding dish 300 metres away was indicated by 15 complete runs through the pattern in 30 seconds. When the dish was moved to 60 metres away, the number dropped to eleven. Von Frisch noted something further. When the scout bees came home to tell their sisters about the food source, sometimes they would dance outside on the horizontal entrance platform of the hive, and sometimes on the vertical wall inside. And, depending on where they danced, the straight portion of the waggle dance would point in different directions. The outside dance was fairly easy to decode: the straight portion of the dance pointed directly to the food source, so the bees would merely have to decode the distance message and fly off in that direction to find their food. But by studying the dance on the inner wall of the hive, von Frisch discovered a remarkable method which the dancer used to tell her sisters the direction of the food in relation to the sun. When inside the hive, the dancer cannot use the sun, so she uses gravity instead. The direction of the sun is represented by the top of the hive wall. If she runs straight up, this means that the feeding place is in the same direction as the sun. However, if, for example, the feeding place is 40? to the left of the sun, then the dancer would run 40? to the left of the vertical line. This was to be the first of von Frisch’s remarkable discoveries. Soon he would also discover a number of other remarkable facts about how bees communicate and, in doing so, revolutionise the study of animal behaviour generally. * Hive – a ‘house’ for bees; the place where they build a nest and live General Training Reading sample task – Sentence completionQuestions 38 – 40 Complete the sentences below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the text for each answer. Write your answers on your answer sheet. 38 Von Frisch discovered the difference between dance types by changing the position of the .................. . 39 The dance outside the hive points in the direction of the ............... 40 The angle of the dance from the vertical shows the angle of the food from the……………………..Answers 38 feeding dish 39 food (source) 40 sun Words in brackets are optional - they are correct, but not necessary.√ You can now move on to Part 2 of this Unit. ................
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