MỘt số kinh nghiệm dạy kỹ NĂng làm bài tậP ĐỌc hiểu môn tiếng anh cho đỘi tuyển học sinh giỏI

Dạng 4: Multiple choices

- Gạch chân hoặc đánh dấu các từ khóa trong câu hỏi hay câu chưa hoàn chỉnh.

- Ghép các từ khóa với các từ có trong bài văn, vì vậy học sinh có thể tìm đúng vị trí chính xác cho câu trả lời.

- Đọc kỹ các phần của bài văn mà người đọc đã đánh dấu và xem họ có thể tìm thấy có từ hay cụm từ nào trùng với sự lựa chọn không. Sau đó cần đọc kỹ đoạn thông tin liên quan tìm thấy để hiểu nội dung của nó và đưa ra câu trả lời đúng.

- Đối với dạng bài này thì từ khóa thường gặp sẽ là Wh – question words như which, what, where, …

- Những lựa chọn có thể đều được nhắc tới trong bài đọc, nhưng quan trọng là các em phải chọn đúng câu trả lời cho câu hỏi đó, dựa vào các từ khóa đã tìm và gạch chân.

The visual language apparent in these artworks is unfamiliar, as is the artist, Eva Hesse. Her work is as exciting as it is disturbing. For many, Hesse’s sculpture refers essentially to the body. This, perhaps, does not seem surprising when it is in relation to the body that women are generally assessed. Hesse died of a brain tumor in 1970 at the age of 34. It must be an inescapable inevitably, therefore, that her work was read in the context of its time where it has, until recently, been

A. is not well-known artist. B. is very familiar, as is her work.

C. is not a good artist. D. is strongly attracted by visual language.

2. The writer concludes that

A. Hesse’s work is timeless.

B. The understanding of Hesse’s work has until recently been interpreted only in the context of its time

C. Hesse’s work is a product of her time and is not relevant to the modern world.

D. Hesse’s work is easy to read.

KEY

1. A

Từ khóa trong câu hỏi là Eva Hesse.

Câu trả lời được chứa trong câu đầu tiên của đoạn văn: “The visual language apparent in these artworks is unfamiliar, as is the artist, Eva Hesse”.

Vì vậy, B không đúng vì từ “unfamiliar” mới là từ đúng theo thông tin trong bài đọc (tương ứng là False); C thì không được nhắc đến trong đoạn văn (tương ứng là Not Given), còn D thì dùng để chỉ những người mà biết công việc của cô ấy, không phải bản thân cô ấy (tương ứng là False).

Vì vậy, A là đáp án đúng hay True.

2. B

Từ khóa trong câu hỏi là writer và conclude.

Câu trả lời nằm ở câu cuối của đoạn văn: “It must be an inescapable inevitably, therefore, that her work was read in the context of its time where it has, until recently, been largely abandoned“.

Dễ dàng thấy B là gần như là một cụm từ được viết trong bài. A và D thì không được nhắc đến (tương ứng là Not given) trong khi C thì chỉ có phần đầu là đúng (tương ứng là False)

Vì vậy, B là đáp án đúng.

Exercise 4: Read the following text carefully and then choose the best answer (A, B, C or D) for Questions 1-8 according to the text.

MIND READING

Whether we know it or not, we all practice the skill of guessing people’s thoughts and feelings

If a baby starts to cry several hours after drinking his last bottle, his mother knows he’s hungry. But suppose a woman’ eyes brim with tears while she watches a DVD. Her husband wonders what she is so upset about. She might tell him directly: “This movie is all about a doomed romance.” That may be true but she could be thinking about how the story reminds her of her own marital troubles. Maybe she’s feeling hurt because she thinks her husband should realize what’s bothering her. Or may be she isn’t even aware that her real-world concerns are intensifying her reaction to the fictional couple. Quickly he searches his mental files – on his wife’s relationship history, on her reaction to their last row, on the way she reacts to similar movies. He watches the expression flickering across her face and it hits him: she knows about his girlfriend!

Every day, whether we’re pushing for a raise or judging whether a friend really likes our redecorating spree, we’re reading each other’s minds. Drawing on our observations, our memories, our powers of reason, and our wellsprings of emotion, we constantly make educated guesses about what another person is feeling. Throughout the most heated argument or the most lighthearted chat, we’re intently collecting clues to what’s on the other person’s mind. “It’s a perceptual ability I call mind sight,” says Daniel Seigel, psychiatrist at UCLA. Mind reading of this sort – not to be confused with the infallible superhero kind of telepathy – is a critical human skill. It enables us to negotiate, compete, cooperate, and achieve emotional closeness with others. Mind-reading ability is perhaps the most urgent element of social intelligence.

It’s astonishing that we can peer into each other’s minds at all, but in truth we generally don’t do it at all well. Strangers (who are videotaped and later report their thoughts and feelings, as well as their assessments of their counterpart’s thoughts and feelings) read each other with an average accuracy rate of 20 per cent. Close friends and marital couples nudge that up to 35 per cent. And “hardly anyone ever scores higher than 60 percent,” reports psychologist William Ickes, the father of empathic accuracy, who based at the University of Texas at Arlington. Ickes is eager to shoot down one of the oldest myths about mind reading – that women have some intuitive advantage. He explains why the gender stereotype persists. “It may be not an ability gap, but an incentive gap.” Support for such an interpretation comes from a study in which researchers offered cash bonuses to participants for accurately reading others’ minds. The payments “wiped out any difference between men’s and women’s performances,” suggesting that men can read minds when they want to.

Our ability to mind read has an ancient roots, says Ross Buck, a professor of communication sciences at the University of Connecticut. Over thousands of years of evolution, human systems of communication grew more sophisticated, as living and working arrangements became more complex. Mind reading became a tool which to “create and maintain the social order,” as Buck puts it. It helped to know when to affirm a commitment to a mate or defuse a dispute with a neighbor Of course, in order to advance our own interests, we still needed to conceal feelings at times, and even to lie. “ We didn’t always want to show exactly what we were thinking, because others could use that to gain the upper hand,” says Buck. Our merely adequate mind sight, then can be thought of “as the product of a compromise between the need to show and the need to hide our true selves”

This delicate balance between perceiving and concealing has served humans well, but Siegel worries that mind-reading ability is now on the decline in our culture. Today’s obsessed-with-success parent spend so much time stimulating their children with structured activities, noisy toys, and “Baby Einstein’s DVDs, they are not sitting still and being “present” with their kids. As a result, they deny children the opportunity to learn how to get in tune with another person, physically and emotionally – that is, to develop mind sight. A reasonable degree of mind sight is required, he says, for a civil society in which adults are kind to one another.

Reading body language is a core component of mind reading. Researchers have shown that when watching a body’s movements reduced to points of light on a screen, observers can still read sadness, anger, joy, fear and romantic love. After so many years of mind-reading evolution, we’re primed to read emotion into movement, even when there’s very little to go on. Facial expressions are also cues. Despite the 3,000 different expressions we may deploy each day, it’s the fleeting micro-expressions that betray many feelings. Unfortunately, the vast majority of us are terrible at detecting them. Still we tent to focus on other’s eyes, and that helps us. The many surrounding muscles make them a richer source of clues than other parts of the face: downcast in sadness, staring hard with jealousy, or glancing around with impatience. We know even more about someone’s mind from the way the components of conversation fit together – someone’s words, gestures, and pitch of voice may seem either compatible or incongruous. But despite all we glean from body language and voice tone, Ickes finds, it’s the content of speech that contributes most to our success at mind reading. Words matter.

1. What point is exemplified by the description of the husband and wife’s behavior while watching the DVD?

A. Women are more emotional than men.

B. Adults have more complex needs than children.

C. People can easily misinterpret each other’s feelings.

D. Relationships require honesty to be successful.

2. What do we learn about the way that mind sight works in the second paragraph?

A. People are often unaware that they are reading another person’s mind.

B. People use both an intellectual process and an emotional one to read minds.

C. People make greater efforts to mind read in formal situations than in informal ones.

D. People often believe that their ability to read minds is a supernatural one.

3. What does William Ickes suggest about people’s ability to read minds?

A. It decreases under the stress of test conditions.

B. It works well in long-established relationships.

C. It is something which is predetermined by gender.

D. It is affected by an individual’s motivation.

4. Which of the following best summarizes Ross Buck’s theory about mind reading?

A. The ability to mind read probably developed before speech.

B. Communities could function effectively because of mind reading.

C. Mind reading is a form of dishonesty which is unique to humans.

D. Good mind readers tend to reveal little about themselves.

5. According to Daniel Siegel, people are loosing their ability to read minds because modern parents

A. fail to interact effectively with their children.

B. do not spend enough time with their children.

C. expect greater academic achievement from their children.

D. are often too stressed to be positive role models.

6. What are we told about the influence of visual information on our ability to read minds?

A. People are instinctively able to interpret the meaning of gestures.

B. Some people have difficulty interpreting the full range of human expression.

C. Eye movement is the most significant source of information for mind reading.

D. It is harder for a person to fake their body language than the tone of their voice.

7. In these paragraphs, the writer is

A. demonstrating ways to improve our mind-reading ability.

B. suggesting when mind reading is most valuable.

C. explaining how the ability to read someone’s mind works.

D. expressing doubt about people’s claims to be good mind readers.

Suggested answer:

Exercise 4: 1C, 2B, 3D, 4B, 5A, 6A, 7C

(From: Amanda French, Ready for CAE teacher’s book Peter Sunderland, Cambridge Universiry Press)

5. Dạng 5: Fill in the blank with a suitable word (tìm từ thích hợp để điền vào chỗ trống)

Ví dụ: Bài đọc này dài khoảng 150 từ trong đó có 10 từ bỏ trống. Chọn trong số 15 từ cho sẵn các từ phù hợp để điền vào chỗ trống.

Cách thức làm bài tập này là bạn phải đọc toàn bộ bài text vì có thể có sự liên kết trong các câu trước hoặc sau trong đoạn văn; hoặc xem xét cấu trúc ngữ pháp để bạn cũng có thể dễ dàng lựa chọn được đáp án đúng nhất.

* Xác định thể loại của 15 từ cho sẵn và nghĩa của chúng (nếu không biết nghĩa của chúng thì cũng không nên lo lắng quá mà để nguyên nghĩa bằng tiếng Anh)

* Xác định thể loại từ của các chỗ trống cần điền thuộc thể loại từ gì thì nhìn vào các từ cho sẵn có cùng thể loại để lựa chọn (vì như thể bạn chỉ phải lựa chọn ít hơn 15 từ sẽ đơn giản hơn và sẽ đạt kết quả đúng cao hơn).

* Điền những chỗ trống dễ lựa chọn nhất, còn những chỗ trống khó thì điền sau.

* Đánh số vào những từ đã lựa chọn rồi để còn ít sự lựa chọn ở các đáp án khác.