Lesson 12 – short answers
Today we are going to look at short answer questions
Today’s lesson is quite a short one too!
Let’s begin with some tips and advice
- These question types call for factual information
- Check how many words you can use in the answer
- Sometimes the question will ask you for a specific detail (e.g. what proportion, name two… what percentage) these should be easy to find but make sure that you still check carefully and be aware of key words.
- Often the most obvious answer isn’t the correct one so don’t throw down the first number you see – match the question and place in the passage as you do with all other types of question.
- The information you need may be on a table or illustration which is part of the reading passage – check these as the text is easy to see.
- The questions may quite often start with ‘which’ this suggests some sort of choice in the question.
Key skills to develop:
These questions can be done quite quickly as long as you have the right place so they will help your speed
- Get good at scanning for very specific information such as numbers, names etc..
- Practise your reading speed by trying to search up and down or from right to left too
- Practice doing it diagonally too and in random ways this stops you from reading the text and helps you to search for individual words
- Use your pencil when skimming to guide your eye
- Now and again stop and read a sentence in detail then skim again- see how you can get a good picture of the text and the relationships of the paragraphs without detailed reading
- Make sure that you stop and analyse the sentence/s that you want for the answer to your question – this is the part of the text that you need to read in detail
Things to do for short answers:
Learn to scan well
- practise scanning business texts to pick out numbers, names of companies and people – these can be found in any good newspaper and they will also help you with the language you need for task 1 writing (you could then go slowly through the text and pick out good vocabulary and phrases to use in your own writing)
- find short answer questions in your IELTS books or online – find the answers quickly (you will then have time for more difficult question types)
- Here’s an exercise to share. Scan the text and see if you can find single word answers.
Don’t forget, if there is anything you don’t understand or can’t find send a message via Contact us
Let’s have a go at a matching exercise
Here are two exercises for you.
The first is the complete exercise you had above. There are more matching exercises to do and a lot of good vocabulary. This is a funny text – did you get the humour?
http://www.gapfillers.co.uk/?atk=982
Try this IELTS short answer exercise
http://www.gapfillers.co.uk/default.aspx?atk=7655
Don’t forget, if there is anything you don’t understand or can’t find send a message via Contact us
Now you’re done!
Good luck and let’s make great progress with IELTS!