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THOUGHT FOR TODAY

Study Success

Dear Student, Welcome dear friend. As you study efficiently, you apply reading comprehension to understand, and extract required information from various written texts. Look.

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July 16, 2023

Different reading strategies are needed when searching a noticeboard for part-time job advertisements and when reading a specialised journal article for new information. If both purposes are achieved, you would have rejected all irrelevant information in the first case and gone beyond the gist of the text with more detailed comprehension in the second case. See?

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Improving Your Reading

A brief conversation about using reading skills

The terms: 1) skimming: quickly running one’s eyes over a text to get the gist of it; 2) scanning: quickly going through a text to find a particular piece of information; 3) extensive reading: reading longer texts usually for pleasure (can be fluency activity and mainly involving global understanding of subject matters); 4) intensive reading: reading shorter texts to extract specific information (an accuracy activity involving reading for detail).

If you look at past English Language papers you will notice the types of reading skills that you need to carry to the examination. Look at the following question-types which can have two different functions.

1. To clarify the organisation of the passage (just any passage type).

The questions can be about:

- the function of the passage

- the general organisation (e.g., argumentative)

- the rhetorical organisation (e.g., contrast, comparison)

- the cohesive devices (e.g., linkwords)

- the intra-sentential relations to some extent (e.g., derivations, morphology, hyponymy)

2. To clarify the contents of the passage.

The questions can be about:

- plain fact (direct reference)

- implied fact (inference)

- deduced meaning (supposition)

- evaluation

The reading skills, question-types and question-functions are much related since a given exercise uses a certain type or set of questions, with a certain function, to make you display a certain reading skill.

Something to Do:

Give the main idea of the two passages below.

The first agent Leamas lost was a girl. She was only a small link in the network; she was used for courier jobs. They shot her dead in the street as she left a West Berlin cinema. The police never found the murderer and Leamas was at first inclined to write the incident off as unconnected with her work. A month later a railway porter in Dresden, a discarded agent from Peter Guillam’s network, was found dead and mutilated beside a railway track. Leamas knew it wasn’t coincidence any longer. Soon after that two members of another network under Leamas’ control were arrested and summarily sentenced to death. So it went on: remorseless and unnerving.

(From J. Le Carré: “The Spy Who Came In From The Cold”)

The main idea of this passage is that a) the police couldn’t stop the murders of Leamas’ men. b) Leamas couldn’t understand why so many people were killed. c) Leamas knew someone was killing his agents. d) the murders of Leamas’ agents were savage and cruel.

The Hotel Taft was on a hill on one of the better sections of town. A wide street curved up past large expensive homes until it neared the top of the hill, then there was an archway over the street with a sign on the archway reading Taft Hotel and as it passed under the archway the street turned into the entranceway of the hotel. Benjamin drove slowly under the archway, then up the long driveway until he came to the building itself. He had to slow his car and wait in a line with other cars, most of them driven by chauffeurs, stopped by the entrance of the building for a doorman to open the door for their passengers. When Benjamin was beside the entrance an attendant appeared at his car and pulled open the door.

(From C. Webb: “The Graduate”)

The main idea of the passage is that a) Benjamin was going to stay in the Taft Hotel. b) The hotel Benjamin went to was a luxurious one. c) There was an attendant waiting for Benjamin in the hotel. d) Benjamin was impressed by the quality of the hotel.

Grammar

Choosing the right word

1. Select from the list the appropriate words to insert in the blank spaces within the sentences. No word should be used more than one time. advise advice formally formerly principle principal accept except complement compliment all ready already

1. Today I received a nice ____ on the outfits.

2. Please ____ the members that the meeting will begin promptly.

3. The firm used the interest from its investments but kept the ____ intact.

4. The representatives are ____ to begin the sales campaign.

5. It is ____ too late to improve sales in this quarter.

6. Ms. Arthurton ____ worked in our regional office.

7. The Board of Directors always takes the ____ of the company’s attorney.

8. I would willingly ____ the responsibility that goes with the job.

9. Everyone ____ Charles spoke in favour of the plan.

10. This product is a fine ____ to our line of tools.

2. Some of the following groups of words are sentences. Others are dependent clauses that are incorrectly treated as sentences. Identify each.

1. Elizabeth misplaced the original family tree diagramme.

2. Because she misplaced the original family tree diagramme.

3. When Grandpa Moffatt bought the grocery store.

4. If we do not finish by tomorrow morning at 9 o’clock.

5. Beaufort has applied for a position with Polyester Manufacturing Inc.

6. Before James tendered his resignation.

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