2020-11-25 TOEFL: S 3, writing practice

Homework: reading pdf p. 13-17 - answer the questions about passages 2 and 3
12 D
13 D (Each course is one note, and there are up to 22 courses on a standard dulcimer.)
14 C (They all agree it’s a stringed instrument, but “some musicologists challenge [the] classification” in the zither family.)
15 A (They can’t agree that it’s even in the zither family, so the zither can’t be an ancester. The other three are mentioned, but C is mentioned in the first paragraph.)
16 B
17 A
18 C
- Sometimes for fact or negative fact questions you have to scan through the whole text to find the answer, not just the paragraph you’re looking at currently.
19 A
20 C
21 D
22 B
23 A
24 C
25 C
26 D (The other three options are mentioned in the last sentence.)
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Speaking Task 3 - You can organize your response like this:
1 Introduction: summarize the definition, and possibly list the two points from the text (without details)
2 Lead-in: state what kind of points the professor makes (types? examples? experiments? effects?) (“The professor describes two examples to illustrate these points.”)
3 First point (“First, he talks about viewing a plate from a different angle.”)
4 Detail/example (“When the angle changes, a round plate looks oval instead of circular, but we know…”)
5 Second point (“Second, he talks about himself in the classroom.”)
6 Detail/example (“From the front of the room, he looks bigger…”)
(7 Conclusion if you have time - “Because of perceptual constancy, we continue to recognize objects even when they look different, so we are not confused when we see familiar things from a new distance or angle.”)
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Speaking practice - record your responses to ETS 2 tests 1-3, speaking task 3 (old 4)
Send your least bad response to me.
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BREAK
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Writing Section: fourth and final section of the test; 55 minutes; two tasks
1 integrated: 3 minutes to read a text, listen to a lecture, 20 minutes to write about how they relate
2 independent: 30 minutes to write an essay to answer a choice question
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The easiest way to get a low score on integrated writing is to miss some or all of the key information from the lecture you hear.
- The lecture almost always disagrees with the text, so listen for details on why the speaker thinks the text is wrong.
- If the text is about advantages or disadvantages of something, expect to hear details about why those advantages or disadvantages are not as significant as the text says.
- If the text is about evidence for a point of view, expect to hear information about why the evidence isn’t very strong.
- Always take notes on both the reading and the listening and make sure you know which points from the lecture go with which points from the reading.
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If the independent writing is about a comparison between two things, make sure that each supporting paragraph talks about both things being compared.
- If you’re writing about why old friends are better than new friends, don’t just support that old friends have some benefit. You also need to support the idea that new friends don’t have that benefit. (And you need to be clear about why it’s an important benefit.)
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Integrated Writing Practice
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Homework: independent writing about life when your grandparents were children (email your response to me)