Student Version

CLE 2254_ Session 2 _ Reading Comprehension

Session Foci:
1) Strategies in Reading: a) Skimming, b) Scanning and c) Reading for details
2) Question type: Heading-matching questions
3) Question type: T/F/NG questions

Part I. Strategies in Reading

In IELTS Reading, there are 14 types of questions that you can be given. You will have
only one hour to read 3 passages and answer 40 questions.

It is important to comprehend the passage skillfully in a short period of time. Please

watch the video: (V1 full version) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtcXr0_201A
and find out more about the strategies: a) Skimming, b) Scanning and c) Reading for
details.

a) Skimming: (V1: 0:00-1:45)

It is a fast reading to get the _____general_____ ______ideas______ of the text.

What is the quickest way to grasp the main ideas of the passage? Which part will you
read first in order to quickly understand the passage?

1. Topic sentences
2. Introduction
3. Conclusion
4. Title
5. Subtitle

1st step Title

2nd step Subtitle

3rd step Introduction

4th step Conclusion

5th step Topic

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Application: Please read the passage on P.3 by following the suggested reading
sequence and try to answer the following questions.

1. 1st step and 2nd step: After reading the title and subtitle, can you speculate what the
theme/topic is?
The passage is about____the positive side of boredom____.

2. 3rd step: How does the last sentence in the introduction echoes with the theme?
In his book, Boredom: A Lively History, Peter Toohey at the University of Calgary,
Canada, compares it to disgust – an emotion that motivates us to stay away from
certain situations. ‘If disgust protects humans from infection, boredom may protect
them from “infectious” social situations,’ he suggests.

______________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________

3. Is/Are there any repeating idea(s) appearing in the conclusion that also echoes with
the introduction?

_____Positive side of boredom _________

______________________________________________________________________

4. After reading the topic sentences, please summarise the body paragraphs.
Paragraph B Types of boredom
Paragraph C Boredom makes people creative
Paragraph D Disadvantage of boredom
Paragraph E Reasons and solution
Paragraph F

b) Scanning: (V1: 1:45-2:18)

Scanning is rapidly reading the text to locate ____specific____ _____details_____.

3 Steps to scanning:
Step 1: Read questions and search for ______keywords____
Step 2: Move quickly over the page
Step 3: Search for ____specific____ _____information___

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Application: Please read the Heading Matching questions on P.5 and try to highlight all
the keywords.

c) Reading for details (V1: 2:18-2:38)

It is the final step to read the passage ____________and _________ to search for the
answers.

Application: Try to complete the heading-matching exercise on P.5 by searching for the
answers from the passage.

READING PASSAGE (Source: IELTS 13, Test 1, Reading Passage 2)

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26 which are based on Reading
Passage 2 below.

Why being bored is stimulating – and useful, too

This most common of emotions is turning out to be more interesting than we thought

We all know how it feels – it’s impossible to keep your mind on anything, time stretches
out, and all the things you could do seem equally unlikely to make you feel better. But
defining boredom so that it can be studied in the lab has proved difficult. For a start, it
can include a lot of other mental states, such as frustration, apathy, depression and
indifference. There isn’t even agreement over whether boredom is always a low-energy,
flat kind of emotion or whether feeling agitated and restless counts as boredom, too. In
his book, Boredom: A Lively History, Peter Toohey at the University of Calgary, Canada,
compares it to disgust – an emotion that motivates us to stay away from certain
situations. ‘If disgust protects humans from infection, boredom may protect them from
“infectious” social situations,’ he suggests.

By asking people about their experiences of boredom, Thomas Goetz and his team at
the University of Konstanz in Germany have recently identified five distinct types:
indifferent, calibrating, searching, reactant and apathetic. These can be plotted on two
axes – one running left to right, which measures low to high arousal, and the other from
top to bottom, which measures how positive or negative the feeling is. Intriguingly,
Goetz has found that while people experience all kinds of boredom, they tend to
specialise in one. Of the five types, the most damaging is ‘reactant’ boredom with its
explosive combination of high arousal and negative emotion. The most useful is what
Goetz calls ‘indifferent’ boredom: someone isn’t engaged in anything satisfying but still

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feels relaxed and calm. However, it remains to be seen whether there are any character
traits that predict the kind of boredom each of us might be prone to.

Psychologist Sandi Mann at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, goes further. ‘All
emotions are there for a reason, including boredom,’ she says. Mann has found that
being bored makes us more creative. ‘We’re all afraid of being bored but in actual fact it
can lead to all kinds of amazing things,’ she says. In experiments published last year,
Mann found that people who had been made to feel bored by copying numbers out of
the phone book for 15 minutes came up with more creative ideas about how to use a
polystyrene cup than a control group. Mann concluded that a passive, boring activity is
best for creativity because it allows the mind to wander. In fact, she goes so far as to
suggest that we should seek out more boredom in our lives.

Psychologist John Eastwood at York University in Toronto, Canada, isn’t convinced. ‘If
you are in a state of mind-wandering you are not bored,’ he says. ‘In my view, by
definition boredom is an undesirable state.’ That doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t
adaptive, he adds. ‘Pain is adaptive – if we didn’t have physical pain, bad things would
happen to us. Does that mean that we should actively cause pain? No. But even if
boredom has evolved to help us survive, it can still be toxic if allowed to fester.’ For
Eastwood, the central feature of boredom is a failure to put our ‘attention system’ into
gear. This causes an inability to focus on anything, which makes time seem to go
painfully slowly. What’s more, your efforts to improve the situation can end up making
you feel worse. ‘People try to connect with the world and if they are not successful
there’s that frustration and irritability,’ he says. Perhaps most worryingly, says
Eastwood, repeatedly failing to engage attention can lead to state where we don’t know
what to do any more, and no longer care.

Eastwood’s team is now trying to explore why the attention system fails. It’s early days
but they think that at least some of it comes down to personality. Boredom proneness
has been linked with a variety of traits. People who are motivated by pleasure seem to
suffer particularly badly. Other personality traits, such as curiosity, are associated with a
high boredom threshold. More evidence that boredom has detrimental effects comes
from studies of people who are more or less prone to boredom. It seems those who
bore easily face poorer prospects in education, their career and even life in general. But
of course, boredom itself cannot kill – it’s the things we do to deal with it that may put
us in danger. What can we do to alleviate it before it comes to that? Goetz’s group has
one suggestion. Working with teenagers, they found that those who ‘approach’ a boring
situation – in other words, see that it’s boring and get stuck in anyway – report less

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boredom than those who try to avoid it by using snacks, TV or social media for
distraction.

Psychologist Francoise Wemelsfelder speculates that our over-connected lifestyles

might even be a new source of boredom. ‘In modern human society there is a lot of
overstimulation but still a lot of problems finding meaning,’ she says. So instead of
seeking yet more mental stimulation, perhaps we should leave our phones alone, and
use boredom to motivate us to engage with the world in a more meaningful way.

Part II: Learn strategies in handling Heading Matching questions

These questions are always divided into different types of questions which you must
complete. Each passage usually has about 3 or 4 different types of questions to answer.

The first challenging question type would be Heading Matching questions. We will use
the reading passage above “Why being bored is stimulating – and useful, too” for
practices. Let’s read some tips on handling this question type:
Answers with detail explanation: https://www.ieltsdeal.com/ielts-reading-cambridge-
13-test-1-reading-passage-2-with-best-solutions-and-explanations/

Try out! Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F

Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.

List of Headings
i The productive outcomes that may result from boredom
ii What teachers can do to prevent boredom
iii A new explanation and a new cure for boredom
iv Problems with a scientific approach to boredom
v A potential danger arising from boredom
vi Creating a system of classification for feelings of boredom
vii Age groups most affected by boredom
viii Identifying those most affected by boredom

14 Paragraph A iv
15 Paragraph B vi
16 Paragraph C i
17 Paragraph D v
18 Paragraph E viii
19 Paragraph F iii

Part III: Question type_ T/F/NG questions

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These questions are stated as a list of facts. You have to look at the text and decide if
the facts are true, false or not given.

Strategies: Scanning and Reading for Details

The questions generally follow the order of the text. So start with question 1.
Scanning: Read the fact slowly to make sure that you fully understand what it says and
highlight KEYWORDS.
Skimming: These questions are stated as a list of facts. You have to look at the text and
decide if the facts are true, false or not given. Simply put:

 If the fact that you are given matches the reading, then it is TRUE.
 If the fact that you are given contradicts the information in the reading in some
way, then it is FALSE.
 If the fact that you are given is not mentioned in the reading, then it is NOT
GIVEN.

Source: British Council Academic Reading Practice Test 1

Application:

Question 1:
Scanning: - Read the questions and highlight keywords.
Question 1) Chronobiology is the study of how living things have evolved over time.
 Then turn the statement into a question.
Example: Is chronobiology the study of how living things have evolved over time?

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Scanning: Scan the keywords in the reading passage.

Example: In this reading passage, I scanned for the noun chronobiology and found this
text: “Chronobiology might sound a little futuristic – like something from a science
fiction novel, perhaps – but it’s actually a field of study that concerns one of the oldest
processes life on this planet has ever known: short-term rhythms of time and their
effect on flora and fauna.”

Reading for details: When you think you have found the answer, read the text carefully
to determine if you think it is true/false/or not given. If the answer to the question you
formed is ‘yes’, then it is true. If your answer is ‘no’, then it is false. If you can’t answer
the question, then the answer is not given.
Example: The reading passage uses the words ‘short-term rhythms of time’, whilst the
question fact says ‘how living things have evolved over time’. Evolving ‘over-
time’ refers to something that happens long-term. So this fact is FALSE.

Try it out on the coming text (p.7-8) by using scanning and reading for details.

Modern Debates on Wind Power

A Wind has been used as a source of power for millennia. In the past, wind was
used to assist in agricultural activities, and even today, some small communities
continue to use wind power to pump water and grind grain. Wind was also harnessed by
early civilizations to power their boats; this was responsible for greatly increasing the
growth of human civilization by allowing greater trading opportunities. More recently,
the application of wind power to energy generation has been touted as a potential
“clean” alternative to other forms of energy generation. However, there is debate as to
whether the use of wind-based energy will become a viable alternative to current
methods of generating energy.
B The turbines that make up wind farms have a simple design relative to other
forms of energy generation. These turbines convert kinetic energy into mechanical
energy using three blades attached to a rotor, which rotates the magnets of a generator.
The resultant electricity can then be transmitted through cables to an electric grid that
can disseminate the power to users. One reason for the appeal of wind farms is that
after they are set up, the cost of running and maintaining them is minimal, owing to
their simple design.
C Debates on the use of wind power can roughly be divided into “global” and
“local” viewpoints. The global viewpoint is primarily related to the potential of wind-
based energy generation on an international scale. For advocates, climate change is an
important issue; they believe that wind power is one component of a holistic approach
to battling climate change. Technological innovations, moreover, tend to see increases
in efficiency and decreases in cost after their introduction and gradual adoption.
Proponents expect a similar trend to apply to wind turbines and argue that this justifies

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the further large-scale development and promotion of the technology. Finally,

advocates on the global scale emphasize that in comparison to the high cost of
installation, the cost of running wind farms afterward is negligible.
D However, arguments from the global viewpoint have also been made against the
use of wind power. The strongest of these oppose adoption on economic grounds.
Critics question whether having governments subsidize what is currently a relatively
inefficient and more expensive alternative energy source is sound policy. They argue
that this money could better be spent on expanding currently existing energy sources
that boast higher efficiency and lower costs. Examples of such alternative energy
sources include nuclear power, while examples of high efficiency and lower cost
traditional energy sources include coal and shale oil. In addition, they argue that in the
interest of environmental conservation, there are other potential alternative energy
sources that deserve equal attention, such as solar and geothermal power.
E In contrast to the global viewpoint, the local viewpoint is focused on the wind
turbines’ effect on the immediate surroundings. Here, supporters argue that the
installation of wind turbines can benefit communities. For instance, municipalities in
some parts of the United States have been able to receive stipends for allowing wind
turbines to be built on their land. Some of these communities also benefit by paying a
reduced cost for electricity.
F Those that argue from the local viewpoint against the adoption of wind power
usually focus on the potential unintended environmental consequences of wind farms
and the social burden placed on rural communities. For instance, species of birds and
bats have been negatively impacted by the installation of wind turbines, which can kill
creatures that venture too near the turning blades. Recent arguments have also been
made that wind farms can affect crop yields by changing the local temperatures. If true,
they argue it is likely to become a pressing issue if more wind power is adopted.
Additionally, research found that citizens living in communities where wind turbines
have been installed complain about the intrusiveness of their appearance. Those in
these communities who rely on tourism could see their livelihood impacted by these
large turbines changing the local scenery. Finally, some have highlighted that residents
in large cities benefit from the installation of wind farms while being insulated
geographically from the downsides. Given the importance of the local community’s
cooperation for large-scale construction of new technology, this resistance may prevent
advocates of wind power from seeing their dreams realized in the near future.

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Do the following statements agree with the information given in the text?
In the boxes below, choose
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

Question 1:
Wind power helped early civilizations gain power over rivals.
True
False
Not Given

Question 2:
Wind power was discovered after human civilization expanded due to trade.
True
False
Not Given

Question 3:
Most experts agree that wind power has lost its usefulness today.
True
False
Not Given

Question 4:
Modern forms of wind energy are much cleaner than past forms.
True
False
Not Given

Question 5:
Critics of wind-based energy say it is not a good use of government funds.
True
False
Not Given

Question 6:
Some communities that installed wind turbines have benefitted economically.
True

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False
Not Given

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