Arab British Academy for Higher Education
The Importance of Reading!!
Practice makes perfect - every time!!
Solutions to Problems
The purpose of this Course is to put you on the right track, whatever may be
your problems, whether lack of reading, difficulty in deciding about the right
approach, or whatever...
When the coming Activities seem difficult, unlikely, I think, at this stage, but
still just possible, do give yourself a pause (there is no hurry), and catch up
on your reading, first of newspapers and magazines, then books, especially
on subjects that interest you; there are plenty of specialist books and
magazines in your library or bookshops generally.
But leaving that aside for the moment, let us proceed with looking at other
problems that may occur when you are dealing with Comprehension
Passages:
Other Problems: When what you are looking for doesn’t seem
to be there
Most people, when trying to answer a question in a Comprehension
Exercise, start by looking furiously through the Passage during their
readings for the answer. If they find it, they will almost certainly copy it word
for word - even if it is not quite the answer; that is to say, what they have
written may not answer the question perfectly, they may have been expected
to adapt it to the actual question... In that case they will lose a few marks,
not all if what they have written is more or less right…
But more serious is their problem when they have checked carefully through
the passage and just can’t find the answer at all ... This sort of question with
a secret answer that has to be guessed at is usually put in deliberately to
test the student’s understanding of the Passage; the tendency of many
students to do blind copying without really knowing the answer is well
known...
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But where is the secret answer??
This is all very well, but accepting there is a secret answer, how do we find
it? Not so difficult in fact, but you have to think, and not rely on blind copying,
which is the last resort of anyone who is basically guessing ... Here are the
steps you take, rather like those of a detective, to get at the truth:
Where is the answer?
i) You read through the Passage three times as suggested, taking the steps
recommended, i.e. making notes and so on as you do so
ii) Instead of looking physically for the Answer, you consider the Question and
try to determine exactly what is wanted... Basically you will be reading
between the lines... In the Passages to come, you will have some examples
of what is meant by this
iii) The way to discover the answer is to understand the Passage, so you can
see not only what it states on the surface, but what it has beneath the
surface. Sometimes, you have to imagine what is being said, and like a
detective, you work out what must be, rather than what is, the answer to a
question... There are times even when there is a choice of answers, one
being no better than another. We will try to show you where there is this kind
of choice...
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