1. Revision guide

2.  A large part of the exam will be based around reading comprehension, which means can you read a long article and show us you understand it.  We practiced this in class with the book Seeing the Evidence: Forensic Scientists at Work.  We will practice again with a new book in the near future  The best thing you can do to practice at home is to practice your reading skills.

3.  There are 3 main skills you need to have to be an effective reader. 1. Skimming – can you read through a text really quickly to get an idea as to what it’s about? It’s like when you quickly look through a newspaper if you are searching for a particular article. You don’t have to read every word of every column just the headlines. 2. Scanning – once you’ve found the part you think want to read you then look quickly through the text to see if it is what you’re looking for. Maybe a date, price or other piece of information. 3. Reading for detail – when you thoroughly read the text because you need to understand it, perhaps because you need to summarise (paraphrase) it in order to give an overview as to what it is about or express an opinion.

4.  You can’t revise for a reading comprehension test as such, because you won’t know what the topic is until the day. However the more vocabulary you know the better. You can also practise working out what a word means by looking at the context, which is how it fits in with the other words in the sentence or paragraph. We will be practicing this in class.

5.  One task in the exam is a Close test.  You need to fill in the gaps with any word of your choice, just so long as the sentence makes sense.  E.g. Only a few years ago, mobile phones ______________ not exist.  Only a few years ago, mobile phones did not exist.  There is a practice Cloze test on Moodle.

6.  In term one we studied A Place to Call Home.  We looked at how we express future actions using:  Simple  Continuous  Perfect

7.  We studied Passive Voice in unit 9. We turned active sentences into passive sentences.  Manufacturers are developing a new type of mobile phone.  Passive : A new type of mobile phone is being manufectured.

8.  We studied the differences between past perfect simple and Past perfect continuous  The students had been preparing for their excursion for months.  The explorer had not imagined that it would be so difficult to cross the river.

9.  In term 1 we learned about first conditional sentences.  This is where a sentence sometimes starts with ‘If’ and has two clauses, one of which depends on the other. For example: ‘If you leave the lights on, you may waste energy.’  Have a look on Moodle, there are the pages we studied plus some more clarification/practice tasks.  You only need to read about the first conditional.