True, False, Not Given Live Lesson

our life welcome to our very special life lesson today my name is Chris if you don't know me lots of you do know me if you followed me over the last two years or so and teaching IELTS online and but if you're just new to this welcome my name is Chris pal I'm the owner of IELTS advantage comm and my website and also numerous other things and also online and today what we're going to do is I'm listen to what you wanted to do lots of you have emailed me and asked me like can you help me with true false not given reading questions we seem to be like one of the most hated questions on the reading paper or just full stop so what I'm going to do today is I've created a nice slide for you so I can show you this and we can go back and forth from that I've created a nice little lesson for you and what I'm going to do is just go through and the different problems that people have and I'll give you some advice about true false not given then I'm going to give you like a step by step and strategy but then I'm going to I've created some questions for you and we're going to have like an interactive lesson where you're going to tell me what you're going to use the strategy to tell me the answers and hopefully that will mean that you can go on and practice using the strategy and when you do your test you can get a good score and for true false not given anyway all right so let me just check so it can check with my phone we are actually live and everything is working okay all right yep okay we 105 people live so that's pretty amazing thank you very much before we start just let me know where you are watching from it's always good to see where people are thank you very much hello - Priya Bridget Claudia Russia reach Iike kill him I can't pronounce loads of these names Jason MD Amaral cool so many different people so just let me know where you are and then we will begin Dubai Birmingham Nepal Philippines sea of India Geneva cool never been to Geneva I'd like to go there else Jeddah in Saudi Arabia London very close to me Adelaide Australia very far from me Istanbul that's another place I'd really like to go Afghanistan well I think you're the first person that's commented from afghanistan egypt philippines lots of people from the Philippines I guess one of the most common ones Melbourne lots of people in Australia okay probably probably pretty late in Australia so it's well 2 p.m. here what is it like 10 p.m. or something Australia so thank you for the people in Australia and who stayed up late for for us so we have about 170 people live so I think that we can begin the lesson ok so just before we begin the lesson and when I'm teaching when I show you my screen you know teaching and I won't be looking at your comments I can't look at your comments but and it wouldn't be a very good lesson if I was constantly checking comments and things like that so what are going to do is I'm going to teach and then when I need your help when I need your comments I'm going to ask for it and if you're watching the recorded version no need to to to comment or do anything because nobody will be looking at them and and then at the end if we have time depending on how long it takes and we will do some Q&A and about anything rate I also wait until the end to ask any questions okay so here we go let me just check my phone to make sure that I can't share my screen and everything is working okay okay all right cool everything's going well so let's begin all right so true false not given so this it this is like a copy of one of the ebooks that I give all the members of IELTS writing Academy and I'm only going to share a little bit of it with you because it wouldn't be fair on people who've paid to join IELTS writing Academy if I and you share it absolutely everything but I'm going to give you a little bit of insight into the things that we share in here and IELTS writing Academy focuses on writing but we also help people with listening reading speaking so this is a little bit of the speaking or the sorry the reading help that we give particularly and true false not given okay so true false not given questions require you to identify if information in the text is true not true or false or not given all right simple so far you will be given a number of factual statements and you have to check in the text if they are true or not or they're just not there you can't tell this is probably the most difficult question type on the reading paper so there are lots of difficult questions on the reading paper I don't know if this is the most difficult one I don't think it really matters but it's definitely the one that I get the most requests and for help with so what do they mean so the most important thing is that you understand the difference between true/false are not given lots of people have a problem with these questions because of the not given and many many you know I'd say 99% of you have done true or false questions before but you've never done the not given part and that's what really throws people off so if you can understand the difference between true and false and not given then you're giving yourself a much better chance to get the score that you need so if the text agrees with or confirms information in the statement the answer is true okay so if you look at the statement and you look at the text and those two things agree or the text confirms that it is true then it's true very very simple if the text contradicts or is the opposite to the information in the statement the answer is false all right again keep it simple all right don't overcomplicate this if there is no information or it is impossible to know the answer is not given no I would argue that this is very very simple and it is over complicated by people all right like many many things on the IELTS test it is very simple but it's over complicated by students so what students do is they get into a panic about the difference between true false not given but if you keep it very very simple and you ask yourself these three things okay does it agree with the text does it disagree with the text or is it just impossible to tell if it agrees with the text that is true if the text disagrees with that statement then it is false if you just have no idea if it is true or false like it's just not there or it's impossible to tell if it is there or not then it is not given do not spend loads and all the time on this just think about it very very logically like that so what are the common problems what are the main reasons why people don't do very well on these types of tests not understanding what not given me so again and people I find it very very difficult to understand this concept because they're just not used to it spending too much time making sure that it is not given so many people understand or no half understand what not given means but because not given means it's not there or it's impossible to tell they spend way too much time looking for it so imagine if you know if you went into a room looking for nothing you would spend quite a bit of time going into looking in that room to make sure that nothing was there and that's kind of what it's like looking for a knock given question you have to have faith and you have to be decisive and do it quickly and decide that it's not there if you spend five minutes on one question then what's going to happen is the rest of your questions throughout the test are going to not be so good because you won't have time a failure to understand exactly what each statement means and therefore being unable to identify if it is true or false so this third point is related to the question statements so you might get five or six question statements and you have to decide if they're true false or not given so if you do not understand those question statements you cannot decide if they're true or false there's no way that you can do that many students just don't spend the time understanding what the statements mean that's might sound like a very obvious thing to say but it's true focusing on key words instead of understanding what the statement as a whole means so many students are taught that you know really basic things about the reading test that you know skimming is important scanning is important and key words are important I that is very irresponsible advice to give anybody because like those things are important but you need to understand that there are many many other things that you need to do as well so just looking at key words in the statements what I understand in the whole statement is a really bad idea so focus first on the question statements understand what they mean and then you can go on the site if they're true or false but that's your starting point so here are some tips for true false not given ignore anything you already know about the topic and don't make assumptions base your answers on the text only so many people look at the answers and decide if it's true or false just based on their prior knowledge of the topic or just a guess and everything needs to be and run through the text you are basing it on the text only identify any words that qualify the statement for example some all mainly often always occasionally these words are there the test if you have read the whole statement because they can change the meaning so if I say that no I occasionally and play football with my son that is completely different from I always play football with my son there they are two completely different the meaning of those two sentences I always do something I occasionally do something and some of them or all of them that two completely different meanings so if you put these qualifying words within sentence you want to change the meaning and that is going to change whether they are true or false not the case with every single question but watch out for them be careful when you see verbs that qualify statements such as suggest claim believe or know again like the words like some or mainly often always sometimes you will get a statement that says someone suggests this or someone believes this or someone knows this that's not the same as if you take that word out of the sentence there will be at least one of all three answers if you don't have at least one true one false or not given you have at least one answer wrong so if there are six answers one of them will be true one of them will be false and one of them will be not given at least one of them if you don't have three of them then some of them some of them are wrong don't skim and scan the text to find the final answer so we talked about this yesterday I made a live video yesterday about skimming and scanning if you don't know what they are just look below this video and you will have to read the appropriate part of the text very carefully in order to understand what the author means so again it is very bad advice to tell a student all you need to do is skim man's gun you need to do those things but the most important thing is that you read the correct part of the text very carefully that is not skimming or scanning it's kind of opposite to that of skimming it's looking at it in a lot of detail and thinking carefully about it that's what you need to do to get the final answer so that is the most important skill is close reading don't look for words that match those in the statements exactly you should also look for synonyms remember that you are matching meaning not words so synonyms are two words that mean the same thing but they are two different words like a man and male they mean the exact same thing but they are two different words and one is ma n one is Mao II so what you are looking for is not exact matching for words so if in the question statement it said man and you're looking for man but it says male and you're not thinking about male you're not thinking about synonyms your going to miss it if you can't find the information you're looking for then it is probably not given don't waste time looking for something that is not there so again we've mentioned this already you are going to be looking for not given you're going to be looking it is it just impossible to tell or is it not there don't spend five minutes looking for something that is not there that will affect your the rest of your whole test it will mean that you will not do very well on your test have faith that if you look for something and it's not there it's not there I know that it's a difficult thing looking for something that is not there but you need to that's why you need to practice these questions and get used to and not given if you have no idea what the answer is put not given you probably have no idea because the answer is not there so just because you are confused and you can't find the answer and you really are unsure doesn't mean that you're just confused between true or false if you really have no idea then it is probably not given I have faith that it is it's it I think the problem with these questions is the uncertainty of not given because a you're looking for sometimes something that is not there um B when you find not given you're kind of confused and people are not very are not used to giving correct answers when they're kind of confused and they don't not sure but being unsure not being able to find something is kind of the key to giving a good answer and giving it a not give an answer okay so answers are in the same order they appear and the texts do not waste time going back keep on reading and so this is very important because it will save you time so say you have six paragraphs in a text and you find the first answer in paragraph three that means you don't have to go back and look at paragraph 2 in paragraph 1 because the answers are in the same order yes no not given questions are slightly different because they do with opinion true false not given questions deal with facts so don't ask me to do a whole lesson on yes no not given like it takes a long time to set this up and I might do that in the future but today we're just going to focus on true false not given but the main difference is the writer's opinion for yes no not given and true false not given is more about factual information okay so here is strategy wow we've got two hundred and twenty nine people and our group or watching life that's amazing thank you to everybody who has joined us and let's move on to the strategy so these strategies are for every different type of question I have a strategy and this is kind of one of the things that I really stress inside my VIP groups that for reading questions lesson in questions every single question requires a unique strategy and so it's just a warning do not use this strategy for other types of questions the strategy for yes/no or sorry matching headings or multiple-choice or matching information those are those strategies are different all right so don't think that you can take this strategy and apply it to any and reading question you can apply it to any true false not given question but don't think that it's going to work for other questions and also this is a strategy that I've developed over years and years of teaching in class and online and this is what I find works best for students but if you want to tinker with it a little bit feel free I've kind of done the work for you and spent years developing this if you want to change it you're free to change it but you know don't come to me and say it didn't work if you change it all right so the strategy for true false not given so we're going to look at this and then we're going to look at some questions always read the instructions carefully and make sure you know if it is true false not given or yes no not given so for any reading question reading the instructions is really really really important because it will have word limit and number limits and telling you exactly what to do and so it's really important that you spend the time to do that read all the statements carefully trying to understand what the whole sentence means rather than simply highlighting key words watch out for qualifying words such as sum or always so that you're going to start with the question statements you're not going to start with the text try to think of the synonyms that might be in the text this will help you identify the matching part of the a text match the statement with the correct part of the text so what we're doing there is we for number four we are scanning we are looking for words in question statement or synonyms and we're matching it with the correct part of the text so really it's just the correct part we're not looking for the answer right now we're just looking for the location because it will help us find the correct answer and be help us and save time because we won't be looking all round the place five focus on the statement again and then carefully read the matching part of the text to establish if it is true or false remember the meaning should match that of the statement exactly if it is true so this part is really scanning and then this part is close reading this part is the most important part this part is where you are going to really find the correct answer and this is where you should be spending most of your time and remember that it should match it exactly if it is not and if it doesn't match it exactly then it's not true underline the words that give you the answer I'll just remove that tidy this up underline the words that give you the answer as this will help you focus and you can check back later again be careful that there are no qualifying words in the text if you can't find the answer mark it as not given and move on to the next question okay so if you are looking at it and you're thinking I'm not sure if it's true I'm not sure if it's false I really have no idea or I just can't find the answer I don't know what I'm doing it's probably not given you can always come back and check it again but it's probably not given if you're really unsure and can't find the answer market is not given okay so that is a strategy so I'll be posting this recording of this video so don't worry if you're frantically trying to write this down I'll be posting the recording immediately after this so and you can always come back to it alright so he you are I think five questions you can hear my little boy playing in the background so if he comes in I might have to abandon this this session okay so here are five five five question statements okay so the first thing that you want to do is you want to read the five question statements and understand the whole em statement so what I want you to do now is take three or four minutes just to read this and understand okay okay so your goal for the first step is to understand these if you don't understand what these mean as much as you can then you're not going to be able to decide if they are true or false or not given this is your starting point so many many people will start to look at the text immediately and they won't really look at these at all and they don't really have a good idea that is a very disorganized way of doing things just let me close this door because my little boy is making lots of noise don't worry is mommy with them I've been just locked in light or anything and okay so the next stage and again when I say that you want to understand these don't worry if there's some some words you don't understand and understand them as much as possible so the next stage is two things we want to do we want to find keywords that are going to help us locate where the answer is in the text so you're going to be given like I'm going to give you this text here so we don't want to be reading absolutely everything we don't want to be reading every single word here because that would be crazy and that was you know it would take us too long so what we want to do is we want to find keywords that will help us locate exactly where in the text are the correct answers and we also want to be thinking of synonyms because remember that it could say something like instead of increased it could have said gone up or went up or something like that instead of research it could have said Inc studies have shown or something like that and and if you were just looking for research but it talked about studies then you're going to be wasting a lot of time okay so and again I'm going through this in a lot of detail it's going to take you a lot less time to do this in the real test don't be thinking like Chris you took 45 minutes to do one you know to do five questions I'm teaching and talking through it at the same time and so that just takes time okay so IQ that is probably the key word and increased in a hundred years the reason why 100 years is useful because there are not many other ways that hundred years can be expressed and so in the text we're going to be looking for 100 years and research iceland are more intelligent okay definitely this again there's not many ways that you can express that and it's probably going to say that exactly or it's just not there spend longer in education how long someone stays in education how many children okay so these are kind of the things that I'm going to be looking for in the text I mean I'm not going to be looking I'm doing this in a kind of a weird way and if this was the real test what I'd be doing is I'd be taking one at a time so I'll be taking you know I'll just be looking for average IQ and increased 100 years and then I'll be going to the text and I'd be looking at that getting the answer and then I'd be doing it number two and then number and then number four and then number five so I'd be going through these steps one question at a time and but because I'm teaching it and I'm doing them kind of all together okay oops sorry for jumping around what we also want to do is we want to be thinking of synonyms okay so this could talk about intelligence this could say has gone up as it went up or something like that the last 100 years in the last century it might say and research could say studies Iceland is going to be Iceland and becoming smarter it might say or their IQ is increasing and genes so could talk about DNA or genetic material or something like that spend longer in education you could talk about university or school or something like that decreased went done and lowered many different ways you could say that many children could talk about offspring or how many I don't know probably is going to say many children they have and sons and daughters or something like that and better job could talk about career prospects job prospects many different ways that you could be thinking of that so why do we think of that we do that because we want to be finding the location of the answer in the in the text okay so what we are going to do now is I'm going to take one question at a time I'm going to show you the text and I'm going to give you say the first one I'll give you like five minutes to do it and then because the first one will be more difficult because you're trying to find where it is and so what I want you to do is the average IQ of people has increased in the last 100 years so remember that or write it down so the average IQ people has increased in the last 100 years so that now we're going to go to the text and you're going to tell me is it true false or not given okay here we go so this is from The Guardian newspaper from 17th January 2017 what I want you to tell me don't read everything locate the correct area and tell me it is true false or not given that the average IQ of people has increased in the last 100 years so just put t F or ng someone has answered already so maybe if you've answered already you're probably wrong so Flores is false under this is as false vows as false Jansen's what one thing I've noticed when I've done these M these live lessons is people just tend to copy the very first answer that they see maybe read the thing a little bit more make up your own mind few people think is not given Irish princess Claudia Christopher whole thing is not given a chica thinks it's not given eugene's is false no one says it's true then says it's true not given Dimas is not given ok so seems to be a debate between is it a false or not given so number two so I'll give you research from Iceland suggests that people are becoming more intelligent research from Iceland suggests that people are becoming more intelligent so just number two you can write that down or just remember a research from Iceland suggests the people are becoming more intelligent so just write 2 and T F and G so 2 T F and G what do you think put which number you're talking about which number question so we know which one because I have no idea if you just put not given our false okay so number three between 1910 and 1975 the number of genes that would make it more likely that people would spend longer in education decreased so between 1910 and 1975 the number of genes that would make it more likely that people would spend longer in education decreased so number 3 3t F ng what do you think so again it seems to be a nice range of answers which is good because the people that got them correct that's excellent but the people that got it wrong that's also good because one of the things that you should be doing is when you get questions wrong on the reading test or the listening test is going back and analyzing why you got it wrong because if you do that you're really going to improve okay so then for the genes affecting how long someone stays in education also affect how many children someone is likely to have the genes affecting how long someone stays in education also affect how many children someone is likely to have so number four T F ng I see lots of people are sharing this thank you very much that people are sharing it on their page really appreciate it okay so lots of people think number four is true few people think it's not given excellent thank you very much to people who have commented and number five someone with fewer children is more likely to get a better job in the future someone with fewer children is more likely to get a better job in the future and if you're watching the recorded version of this feel free you know you can pause it you don't have to write everything down and I'll be posting the recorded version and immediately after this live video so number five five t f ng what do you think while we get nearly 400 comments already thank you okay so 5 TF n G what do you think I'll show you the the answers now in a minute okay so here are the answers number one not given number two false number three true number four true number five not given all right so there's two not given one false are two true so what I want you to do so thank you wait one second so what I want you to do and this is something that you should do if you're if you're very serious about getting a good score in reading or listening this is what you should be doing after you practice in that way and you should be going back and analyzing your answers so thinking about like if you got them true great you don't have to spend too much time on that but one thing that you could do is just go back and think about logically why is it true if it's a really easy one you know it was really obvious and you don't need to spend that much time on it but if it was like I don't know if it's true or false or not given go back and think about the statement think about the text and why it is true even more importantly and if you got some wrong that that's a really good thing you should see that as a positive thing because it's your chance to really improve with the ones that you got wrong it's imperative it's really important that you go back you look at the text you look at the question statement and you think like why was this true why was this false why was it not given that is one of the best ways for you to improve and like lots of people say like I don't know how to do true false not given questions say well how many practice tests have you done oh I've done 20 practice tests well did you look at why you got the questions wrong no I never did that like that if you did if you did two practice tests and you analyzed why you were correct and why you were wrong that's probably better than doing 20 practice tests and not doing that the other thing that I would suggest you do is like if you like that am strategy that I gave you take the strategy you won't be able to just look the strategy an immediately cool and get like a bad line that's not how it works or immediately go and get you know every true false not given question correct what I would suggest you do is you can write that down or print it off or whatever you want to do and get lots of practice questions true false not given practice questions and work with that strategy and go through it step by step really really methodically and you want to be basically like a robot in your reading test and just going through everything step by step in order and it will take you long a long time to do that in the beginning but it is going to really really improve and all of your improve your test scores and you will get faster at it like most students who I give that to it takes them a very long time to go through the strategy at the beginning but like anything once you do it a few times it becomes really really fast and you don't even have to think about it and okay so let me see if we have any comments or questions or anything like that hmm so did you how many did you get correct let me know where did you get them all correct did you get some of them correct most of them correct what do you think four or five good all correct Jessica well done Jessica four and five I don't agree you don't agree with me okay if you can make a plausible and argument why I'm wrong I'll listen to you and three out of five now by two look at the two that you got wrong five out of five bogged down well done rust I've got four or five lots of people got five out of five well done okay so I think I'll leave it there and what I'm going to do is I'm going to post a link below the video the recorded version of this video and I'll post a link to more of my and reading resources and thank you very much to all the people at joint I spend most of my time like looking after my the people in my VIP course and the people in my like paid facebook group because basically they paid money to and that's where I spend most of my time looking after them but I'm going to try and do at least one of these live lessons a week and I've done it for the last I think number of weeks four or five weeks and just to give something back to the people that can't afford the VIP stuff we can't afford there and the the Facebook group and so if you have enjoyed today or you've liked it you don't have to give us any money or anything like that all we ask for is that you share or like or comment or whatever it is just to say thanks and that's all we ask for and 99% of your IELTS questions are answered over on IELTS advantage comm that is our free site free to everybody who wants to to get information about it and just going up check it out there's search bars where you can search for your stuff and 99 percent of questions are answered there so yeah thank you very much I'll just check in case there's anything pending before we go no okay thank you very much everybody who joined us I think a crazy my speedrun join us and so yeah thanks again and I'll see you soon

Channel: IELTS Advantage

Views: 40,791

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Id: PfpS5ECCzOw

Length: 43min 21sec (2601 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 26 2017