BUILDING SKILLS READING (37) CAMBRIDGE PREPARATION FOR THE TOEFL® IBT TEST

 

CAMBRIDGE PREPARATION FOR THE TOEFL® IBT TEST BUILDING SKILLS READING (37)

 

PRACTICE WITH SUMMARIES AND CHARTS Your ability to understand how a reading passage is organized and to grasp the relationships between details and main ideas will be tested in the Reading section of the TOEFL test. In the last item for each reading passage, you will be required to extract information from the entire passage and arrange the given text options into a summary or a category chart. Your ability to recognize and understand compare-and-contrast, cause-and-effect, and agree-and-disagree relationships, as well as steps in a process, will help you to succeed on these questions. Summary questions These questions require you to understand the main ideas that together form a summary of the passage. You will be given the first sentence in a summary and a list of other sentences. You will then be asked to choose which of the other sentences complete the summary by clicking on your choices and dragging them into a box. It is not necessary for you to put them in the correct order. The number of choices will be apparent by the number of spaces in the box. Incorrect answer choices can be sentences that are details from the passage but are not critical to the understanding of the passage or to the formation of a summary. Incorrect choices can also be sentences that contain ideas that were not explicitly stated or information that is not mentioned within the passage.   Category chart questions These questions require you to organize important material from the passage into a chart. You will be given a two-column chart with answer choices on the left and category headings on the right. You will then be asked to sort the answer choices under the appropriate headings by clicking on the choices and dragging them from the left column to the right. You will not always use all of the answer choices. Incorrect answer choices may include information that is not mentioned in the text. Incorrect choices can also be incorrect generalizations or conclusions.   Exercises R22-R24 Use Exercises R22-R24 to build your skills in recognizing the relationships between details and main ideas in reading passages. EXERCISE R22 Understanding summaries Read each passage and the statements that follow it. Write S in the blank if the sentence summarizes the passage. Write D if the sentence expresses a detail in the passage. If the sentence expresses ideas not found in the passage, write N. 1 Because winning or losing a race in skiing can be a matter of a tiny fraction of a second, skiing equipment has undergone many changes. Even clothing has changed as skiers search for ways to increase speed. Now they wear one-piece suits that cling to their bodies in order to reduce wind resistance. Nothing is worn under these tight-fitting suits as anything extra may mean the loss of an important millisecond. A ___________ Skiers are always searching for ways to change their appearance for an important race. B ___________ Skiing equipment and clothing have been developed specifically to increase racing speeds. C ___________ Clothes that cling to a skier's body cause less wind resistance. 2 Rice is the only major grain crop that is grown almost exclusively as human food. Some remarkable genetic advances have made it possible to cultivate high-yield varieties that are resistant to disease and insect pests. Because rice constitutes an essential part of the diet for much of the world's population, these advances have averted disasters that otherwise would have left millions of people severely underfed. A ___________ Rice has been genetically modified for use as animal feed. B ___________ New rice varieties have prevented many people from going hungry. C ___________ Genetic advances have led to high-yield rice varieties.

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