IELTS Reading 1 — Find It: Lesson 5

Write this on the board:

60 MINUTES · 3 PASSAGES · 40 QUESTIONS

  Passage 1   13 questions   easiest
  Passage 2   13 questions   harder
  Passage 3   14 questions   hardest

  1 mark each.   No extra time to copy answers.   Spelling counts.

TIME:   P1 = 15 min    P2 = 20 min    P3 = 25 min

Then ask these three questions:

1. “60 minutes, 3 passages. How long for each?” They say 20. Show the board: 15 / 20 / 25. Passage 3 is harder, so it needs more time.
2. “What if you spend 30 minutes on Passage 1?” Let them answer: you lose Passage 3 — 14 marks.
3. “In Listening you get 10 extra minutes to copy your answers. In Reading?” They usually don't know. Answer: none.

Then show the scores:

Last thing: tell them today is about questions that ask you to find information. Next lesson is the harder question types.

Step 1 — ask (2 min)

“When you get a passage, what do you do first?” They will say “read the passage.” Tell them that is the mistake this lesson fixes.

Step 2 — board this (3 min)

TITLE  →  QUESTIONS  →  PASSAGE

  2 min    read title + all questions, highlighter in hand
 11 min    find the answers
  2 min    check word limits and spelling

The questions tell you what to look for.

Step 3 — hand out (10 min)

Give out Cambridge 8, Test 2, Passage 1 (Sheet glass manufacture). Cover or fold the passage — they get the questions only. Timer: 2 minutes. They do four things on the paper:

1. Highlight the title. Say what the passage is about in one sentence.
2. In each question, highlight the word that will not change — a name, a number, a date, a capital letter. This is the word they will look for.
3. Circle the word limit (ONE WORD? TWO WORDS?).
4. Above each gap, write what kind of answer it needs: a date? a material? a person?

Step 4 — check, then uncover (5 min)

Check three questions with the whole class. Only then let them see the passage. First job with the passage: find the highlighted words. Do not answer yet.

Step 1 — show one example (3 min)

The question never uses the same words as the passage. Board this and underline the matching words:

QUESTION:  Scientists used to believe the brain was inactive during sleep.
PASSAGE:   ...scientists once thought that the brain effectively shut down at night.

  used to believe  =  once thought
  inactive         =  shut down

Step 2 — pairs do Drill A (10 min)

Send them to Drill A — 10 real pairs from Cambridge 5, 6 and 7. They write the matching words in the last column. They do not answer the questions.

Step 3 — check 3 items only (2 min)

Check items 3, 7 and 10. Each teaches something new:

• 3 — a gap, not a statement
• 7— the words match but the number is wrong (“every city” vs “thirty-seven cities”)
• 10— the words match but the meaning is opposite (“high speed” vs “gentle”)

Step 1 — board this and leave it up (3 min)

Find the place in the passage. Then:

  Passage says it           →  TRUE
  Passage says the opposite →  FALSE
  Passage says nothing      →  NOT GIVEN

For FALSE you must point at the words. No words = NOT GIVEN.

Step 2 — show one of each on the board (7 min)

Before they touch the worksheet, they need to see all three answers happen in one short text. Put these two paragraphs on the board — they are the real opening of Cambridge 7, Test 4, Passage 1 (Pulling strings to build pyramids) — and copy the three statements under them. Statements 1, 2 and 3 are the real Cambridge questions, and they happen to give you one TRUE, one FALSE and one NOT GIVEN in a row.

PULLING STRINGS TO BUILD PYRAMIDS

The pyramids of Egypt were built more than three thousand years ago,
and no one knows how. The conventional picture is that tens of
thousands of slaves dragged stones on sledges. But there is no
evidence to back this up. Now a Californian software consultant
called Maureen Clemmons has suggested that kites might have been
involved. While perusing a book on the monuments of Egypt, she
noticed a hieroglyph that showed a row of men standing in odd
postures. They were holding what looked like ropes that led, via
some kind of mechanical system, to a giant bird in the sky.

Intrigued, Clemmons contacted Morteza Gharib, aeronautics professor
at the California Institute of Technology. He was fascinated by the
idea. "Coming from Iran, I have a keen interest in Middle Eastern
science," he says. He too was puzzled by the picture that had
sparked Clemmons's interest.


1  It is generally believed that large numbers of people were
   needed to build the pyramids.

2  Clemmons found a strange hieroglyph on the wall of an
   Egyptian monument.

3  Gharib had previously done experiments on bird flight.

Work them one at a time. Do not give the answer — make them find the words first.

Step 3 — work through the worksheet together (12 min)

Go to Worksheet — True / False / Not Given. It is the real opening of Cambridge 6, Test 2, Passage 1 with its real questions 6–10. Students already know this text from Drill A, so they can spend the time on the decision, not on reading.

Do one question at a time. Every time, ask two things:

1. “Which paragraph?”
2. “Read me the words that prove it.”

If they cannot read you words that say the opposite, the answer is not FALSE — it is NOT GIVEN. Question 8 is the one that teaches the whole lesson: the passage talks about trams and cars, but never says anything is dangerous.

Step 4 — they practise alone (8 min)

Cambridge 8, Test 3, Passage 2 — this passage is True/False/Not Given only. Timed, no help. When you check, only discuss the NOT GIVEN ones — that is where the marks are lost.

Do this straight after Stage 4, while True/False/Not Given is still on the board. They are the same three buttons. Only the thing you are judging changes.

TRUE / FALSE / NOT GIVEN   →  FACTS.
                             Did it happen? Is it so?

YES  / NO    / NOT GIVEN   →  WHAT THE WRITER THINKS.
                             Does the writer agree?

Read the instruction. If it says "claims of the writer"
or "views of the writer", the answer is YES or NO.
Writing TRUE there scores zero.

Say the last line twice. A student who understands the passage perfectly and writes TRUE instead of YES gets nothing. The instruction line tells them which words to use, and it is the one line they skip.

Show it with a real one (6 min)

Put these three extracts on the board — they are from Cambridge 6, Test 4, Passage 1 (Doctoring sales, about drug companies and doctors), with its real questions 8, 9 and 12.

A drugs rep can offer "a budget that could buy lunches
and dinners for a small country, hundreds of free drug
samples and the freedom to give a physician $200 to
prescribe her new product."

"Selling pharmaceuticals is a daily exercise in ethical
judgement. Salespeople walk the line between the common
practice of buying a prospect's time with a free meal,
and bribing doctors to prescribe their drugs."

"Free samples of new and expensive drugs might be the
single most effective way of getting doctors and patients
to become loyal to a product. Salespeople hand out
hundreds of dollars' worth of samples each week."


 8  Sales representatives like Kim Schaefer work to a
    very limited budget.

 9  Kim Schaefer's marketing technique may be open to
    criticism on moral grounds.

12  The drug companies may give free drug samples to
    patients without doctors' prescriptions.

Step 1 — board this (5 min)

Start by taking away their fear of the six different names. In the exam, the instruction can say complete the notes, complete the sentences, complete the table, complete the summary, complete the flow-chart or label the diagram. Students think these are six different questions they have to learn. They are not. Every one of them is the same task: a missing word, and you find it in the passage. Only the shape on the page changes.

So write the six names on the board in a list, and tell them what each one looks like — notes have bullet points, a table has boxes, a flow-chart has arrows, a diagram has a picture with lines pointing at it. Then draw one line through the whole list and write ONE JOB next to it. Tell them: you do not have to learn six things today. You have to learn one thing, and it works on all of them.

FILLING GAPS — FOUR MOVES

  1. WHAT KIND OF WORD?   a thing? a person? a number? one or many?
  2. FIND THE PLACE       use the words around the gap
  3. COPY IT EXACTLY      never change the word
  4. READ IT BACK         does the whole sentence sound right?

  OVER THE WORD LIMIT = 0

Now do one gap with them, on the board, so the four moves are not just words:

The Egyptians had ________ , which could lift
large pieces of stone.

  What kind of word?  a thing — and MANY of them.
                      So the answer is plural.

They have not seen the passage yet and they already know the answer ends in -s. That is move 1 doing its job.

Move 4 is the one they will skip. Insist on it: the answer is only finished when they have read the whole sentence out loud and it sounds like English.

Step 2 — guess before looking (5 min)

Go to Worksheet — filling gaps, but keep the paragraph covered — a hand, a sheet of paper, or just tell them not to look at it yet. Read the summary aloud and for each gap ask one question only: what kind of word is missing?

They will not know the answers, and that is the point. Gap 8 needs a plural thing (“The Egyptians had…”). Gap 10 needs a person, plural (“their skill as…”). Gap 12 needs a thing you can experiment with. Write their guesses next to the gaps. Now uncover the paragraph — with the shape of the answer already decided, most of them find it in seconds. That is the whole lesson of this stage.

Step 3 — they fill it in (10 min)

In pairs, on the worksheet. It is the real Cambridge 7, Test 4, Passage 1, questions 8–13, and it is the same passage they saw on the board in Stage 4 — so they are spending the time on the gaps, not on a new text.

While they work, watch for two things: an answer of three words, and an answer that is right but does not fit the sentence. Do not correct them at the desk — collect these for the check.

Step 4 — check, and argue about 9 (5 min)

Take the answers one at a time and make them read the whole sentence out, not just the word. Spend the time on gap 9: the passage says “massive blocks of stone”, but the summary already says “large pieces of”, so only stone works. A student who copied “blocks of stone” found exactly the right place and still lost the mark. That is the most useful mistake of the stage — praise the hunt, then show the cost.

Homework or extra practice, if they finish early: Cambridge 9, Test 4, Passage 1 (Marie Curie — notes completion, ONE WORD only, plus True/False/Not Given).

Teach this straight after Stage 6, because it is Stage 6 in disguise. A short answer question is a gap with a question mark on it — the same four moves, the same word limit, the same order down the page.

SHORT ANSWER = FILLING GAPS, WRITTEN AS A QUESTION

  What is produced to help an athlete plan
  their performance?            ← the question

  ______________________        ← still just a gap

  NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS.
  "They produce a computer printout"  =  0 marks.
  "a computer printout"               =  1 mark.

Step 1 — kill the sentence habit (3 min)

This is the only new thing in the stage, and it is the only thing that loses marks. Because the paper asks a question, students answer it politely, in a sentence — and a polite answer is over the word limit. Tell them: do not answer the question. Copy the words that answer it.

The example on the board is real — Cambridge 6, Test 1, Passage 1 (Australia's Sporting Success, question 12). Write both versions up and ask which one scores. They will say the sentence, because it is better English. That is exactly the belief you are breaking.

Step 2 — the worksheet (7 min)

Go to Worksheet — short answer questions — Cambridge 9, Test 1, Passage 1 (William Henry Perkin), real questions 8–13, NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS. In pairs, 7 minutes.

Check only three of them out loud, and pick these: 10(the passage offers a wrong answer, “Tyrian Purple”, before the right one), 11 (a name, so it is not paraphrased and takes five seconds), and 12 (France and England are in neighbouring sentences). The other three are gifts.

Step 1 — 15 minutes, no help

Go to Worksheet — timed practice — Cambridge 5, Test 4, Passage 3, The effects of light on plant and animal species. Questions 27–33 are True/False/Not Given and 34–40 are sentence completion, so every question is a type they were taught today and nothing else. Start the clock and stop them at 15 minutes even if they have not finished.

Their answers appear on your dashboard as they type, so you can see who is still on question 30 with two minutes left without walking around the room.

Step 2 — swap and mark

Read the fourteen answers out from the key below. They mark a partner's sheet, not their own — marking someone else's makes them argue, and arguing is where the learning is.

Step 3 — a reason for every mistake

For each wrong answer they say out loud which one it was:

• I did not read the question properly
• I did not see that the words had the same meaning
• I ran out of time

Ask them to tell you the four rules. Do not tell them.

Set one passage from the table below: 15 minutes, timed, with a reason written next to every wrong answer.