2.1 Introduction
The purpose of the Reading module is to gauge your capacity to read and answer questions about passages. There are 3 passages, and after each passage there are 12 to 14 questions giving a total of 39 questions. There are usually 600 to 700 words in each passage. You have 60 minutes to complete this module.
2.2 Skills Required
1 You need to be able to scan for details.
2 You have to use clues associated with context to comprehend the meaning of words.
3 To be able to deduce inferences.
4 To understand and identify coherence.
5 To comprehend how the author defines certain ideas.
6 To comprehend why the author refers to particular details or uses particular examples.
7 To have the ability to identify sentence …show more content…
2.3 The Passages
The passages resemble material which you would find in a university. They take in a wide range of topics but follow the general subjects listed below :-
1 Art – including dance, drama, literature, architecture, sculpture, painting.
2 Autobiographies and biographies.
3 Geography, culture, history, government.
4 Social sciences – including psychology, economics, anthropology, urban studies, sociology.
5 Science and technology – including engineering, astronomy, mathematics, geology, medicine, physics, biology chemistry.
You will find that the majority of the topics have a North American bias. Also, biographies will be based on artists, scientists, historical figure, etc.
The passages can either explain something or they can give a story about a person or an event. They can display various organizational patterns such as comparison and contrast, cause and effect, classification, analysis, definition.
2.4 The Questions
The majority of questions are multiple-choice. They are :-
1. Factual questions – You need to find and discern particular …show more content…
Author’s method questions – these will ask you how the author defines or achieves something in the passage.
7. Author’s attitude questions – these are based on the author’s perceptions concerning ideas and issues or about a person – all from the passage.
8. Sentence restatement/simplification questions – you are asked a choice concerning restatement and summarization of sentence information from the passage.
9. Reference questions – you are asked what word a reference word (ie., pronoun) refers to.
The final two questions in each question set have distinct instructions.
10. Sentence Addition questions – the penultimate question in each question set will generally be a sentence addition question. You will be asked to add a sentence into the passage. You need to click on one of four black squares in order to locate the position.
11. Complete-the-Summary/Chart question – one of these questions will be present. You get two points for the former and three/four points for the latter question. With a complete-the-summary question, you choose three from six to give a passage summary. Incorrect choices are either insignificant or not mentioned in the passage. With the complete-the-chart question, you need to classify a number of choices in a