In Tuition
WORD OF THE WEEK!
Pass out (phrasal verb)
1: to become unconscious, for example, “‘I suddenly felt dizzy and passed out”.
2: to leave a military college.
Quite a few people use pass out incorrectly, like “I passed out of university”. The correct word to use here is to graduate.
IELTS TIP
The IELTS reading module is incredibly difficult to navigate. You only have an hour to prove yourself and in addition to reading and understanding the texts, the variety of question types—40 in total—are designed to push you to the limits.
One of the first skills you need to practice is reading quickly and skimming. This will enable you to get a general idea of the text—you don’t need to understand every word!
What is skimming? We skim read all the time in our daily lives. For example, nobody sits down and reads a magazine from page one to the end. Usually, we just flick through it, look at the images and glance at the
headings to see if we want to read an article any further and get a general idea of what it contains.
We can apply this to the IELTS reading exam. Instead of reading the texts in depth from the beginning (which causes panic and confusion!) the first thing you should do is glance at headings, titles and pictures to introduce yourself to the material slowly. You should then read through the rest of
the text quickly to try to understand the broader meaning of the whole text. This will make you more comfortable later on when you attempt the questions.
Set yourself a time limit to skim, two or three minutes. This is something you can practice with past papers, or with longer
articles in journals and magazines when you are preparing for the exam at home.
When you are skimming, it’s useful to try to identify the central idea in each
paragraph. You could either underline this in the text itself or write it in the margins. This will help you to make a structural topic map of the text which is a great time saving device for the exam. Doing this will assist in finding information quickly when answering the questions.
GRAMMAR SPOT
A pharmacist working in his shop sees a man nervously waiting to be served.
“Excuse me, sir, are you wanting anything?”
“Yes,” the man replies, “I’m needing some painkillers, I’m having the most
terrible headache.”
“I’m thinking I’m having some here…”
“What? I’m not understanding, I’m not hearing you!”
“Don’t be worrying, sir, wait a minute and I’ll do something about that pain in
your head.”
The present continuous tense is often tricky for language learners. It is one of the first tenses we learn after the present simple. We use it to explain an action which is happening right now. What’s the problem then?
Some verbs, called state verbs in
grammar books, should not be used in the present continuous, or indeed in any
continuous form, past, present or future. We’ll stick to present here though, as that is where the problem often lies for learners.
What are state verbs? When we think of a verb, we think of an action, such as play, do or make. These verbs are fine to use in continuous tenses. But state verbs, are those which describe:
• Emotion, such as love, hate, need
• Possession, like have, own, belong
• Thoughts, for example, believe, know and agree
• And then those verbs connected to the senses, such as touch, see, smell, hear and taste
It’s therefore fine to say, “I’m eating pizza”, but if we use a verb from one of the groups above, we can’t say, “I’m
having a car” or “I’m agreeing with you”.
Why does this rule cause problems? If we look at English spoken in India, the continuous form is often over-used and you’ll hear this mistake a lot. In fact, many native speakers also sometimes do this excessively, especially in American English. One of the biggest American companies, Macdonald’s, has the slogan, “I’m loving it”, which in fact is incorrect—it should be “I love it”!
Even though the Americans make this mistake in their speech, because they are native speakers, to some extent they are
forgiven more easily. They also make this mistake with only a few state verbs such as love, hate and feel, and you wouldn’t hear an American saying “I’m believing you”. This is why it’s important for non-native speakers of English to try and learn the rules and use them as correctly as possible.
Posted on: 2012-02-09 09:38
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