Summary completion: IELTS reading practice

Summary completion: IELTS reading practice

Tips and strategies

Reading Portfolio Task 1 will contain summary completion questions

We already practiced this type of question in class last week

What is a summary?

• A short version of a longer text

• A paragraph that gives the main facts or ideas about the text

Read three paragraphs about languages, and choose the correct summaries!

(We only use short texts for this practice; real IELTS reading and summaries are longer)

Multiple Choice

There are about 313 million Arabic speakers in the world, making it the fifth most-spoken language globally behind Mandarin, Spanish, English and Hindi.

Egypt holds the record for the largest Modern Standard Arabic-using population at around 65 million people. Next is Algeria, which has about 29 million. Then it’s Sudan with 27 million, and following behind in the list are Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Morocco.

• The United States has a little more than one million Arabic speakers within its borders.

• Millions of people speak Arabic in many different countries.

• Arabic is a beautiful language that has been spoken for more than a thousand years.

Multiple Choice

Learning a foreign language is not a popular option at school in Britain. In UK schools it is common for children to start studying a foreign language at the age of 11 and many students give up languages completely at 14. So why don’t young people continue with languages at school? Research suggests that students think it is more difficult to get good grades in languages than in other subjects such as science or history.

• Many British students only study a foreign language for 3 years, because it is easier to get good grades in other subjects.

• Students in the UK do not like studying a foreign language because they are lazy and only want to speak English.

• The British government is now looking at different ways to improve language learning at school.

Multiple Choice

One of the most influential ideas in the study of languages is that of universal grammar. Put forward by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s, it is widely interpreted as meaning that all languages are basically the same, and that the human brain is born language-ready, with an in-built programme that is able to interpret the common rules underlying any mother tongue.

• The idea of universal grammar influenced work in linguistics, psychology and cognitive science.

• Many people think that languages are similar to each other because babies all sound the same.

• A famous scientist said that languages are not that different from each other because they all have the same common rules.

Good news: for the IELTS reading test, the summary is already written for you!

However, they removed a few words from the summary and you have to choose the correct words to complete the sentences.

Read and memorise these 5 top tips and answer questions on Quizziz:

1, You do not need to read the (whole) text to complete the summary. Read the summary and the list of words to choose from.

2, There are more words than gaps! You will not use every word / option.

3, Start with the sentences that are easy for you. Do not spend too much time looking for the answer for the difficult questions.

4, The answer has to be gramatically correct!

5, Do not read the text trying to find the same words as in the summary. They use synonyms (= different words with the same meaning).

Multiple Choice

Choose the correct option!

• You should read and understand every single word in the text to complete the summary

• You should focus on the summary and the list of missing words / options to choose from

Multiple Choice

Choose the correct option!

• If there are 5 gaps in the summary, you will get 5 words to choose from.

• If there are 5 gaps in the summary, you will have more than 5 words to choose from, so you will not use all the words.

Multiple Choice

You read the summary and you see some sentences which are easy and other sentences which are difficult. What do you do?

• I complete the easy sentences first and try to fit some of the remaining words into the more difficult sentences.

• I choose the most difficult sentence to complete first. I do not know the answer so I start panicking, spend the next twenty minutes trying to find the answer and do not have time left for any other questions.

Multiple Choice

'Thousands of languages are ______________ around the world.'

• speak

• spoken

• talk

Go to Files - open 'Is Technology Harming our Children’s Health? -

Reading practice'

Spend 5 minutes skim reading the text, then answer questions in a separate Quizziz. There will be 9 questions: Yes/No/Not given and summary completion