IELTS READING

Han Nguyen
Types of question in Ielts
 Read the title of the passage.

Read the headings before you read the passage.

Spend time paraphrasing and underlining keywords in the possible

headings, try to remember the keywords of the headings.
How to “defeat”
matching heading Skim through the paragraphs to find the main idea.

questions??? Try to match the best heading choices

Make it a habit to cross out those headings that you’ve already chosen.

Go back and quickly read the sections again and re-evaluate your
guesses, make changes if neccesary.
 There are more headings Do not be misled by
than you need. However, headings that include
there can only ever be only specific details
one possible heading for rather than a general
each paragraph. idea.

OOPS – A – DAISY!
Do not try to match the The passage is too long
HOW CAN YOU BE keywords. to read.
DEFEATED?

Never leave blanks Topic sentences can be

unanswered everywhere.
Gee! What the hell is the keyword???
Find the keywords in reading passage Find the keywords in reading questions
- You should underline keywords to understand the - An extremely important strategy of underlining
paragraph by abstracting important information from keyword is to identify the focus of the question. Focus
it. or stem of the question is a word in the question that
will help you to choose the right option. 
- Keywords you underline are usually nouns, group of
- You can definitely underline some keywords such as nouns, verbs etc. except articles (a, an, the),
names, locations, facts, figures etc. prepositions (for, in, at etc.) and others.

Tips when practising

Keywords in the question Keywords in the passage
Practice questions: Identifying keywords

Paragraph
A super-hard metal has been made in the laboratory by melting together
titanium and gold. The alloy is the hardest known metallic substance
compatible with living tissues, say US physicists. The material is four times
harder than pure titanium and has applications in making longer-lasting
medical implants, they say.
(Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36855705)

Question
The hardest substance discovered in the laboratory is formed by
combining titanium and gold after they are ……………
Keywords in question Similar keywords in paragraph
Hardest substance Super-hard metal
Discovered in the laboratory Made in the laboratory
Combination Together
ANSWER: MELTED

ANSWER
PARAPHRASING: WORD “LIE”

Different forms Synonym

Lie – lied - lied (v) Deceive (v)
lying Mislead
Lie (n) Misrepresent
Liar (n) Deceit, Deception, Dishonesty (n)
List of headings

i. Unsuccessful deceit
ii. Biological basis between liars and artists
iii. How to lie in an artistic way
iv. Confabulations and the exemplifiers
v. The distinction between artists and common liars
vi. The fine line between liars and artists.
vii. The definition of confabulation
viii. Creativity when people lie
PARAGRAPH A
Shortly before his death, Marlon Brando was working on a series of
instructional videos about acting, to he called "Lying for a Iiving”. On the
surviving footage, Brando can he seen dispensing gnomic advice on his
craft to a group of enthusiastic, if somewhat bemused, Hollywood stars,
including Leonardo Di Caprio and Sean Penn. Brando also recruited
random people from the Los Angeles street and persuaded them to
improvise (the footage is said to include a memorable scene featuring two
dwarves and a giant Samoan). "If you can lie, you can act." Brando told
Jod Kaftan, a writer for Rolling Stone and one of the few people to have
viewed the footage. “Are you good at lying?” asked Kaftan. "Jesus." said
Brando, “I'm fabulous at it".

Brando was not the first person to note that the line between an artist and a
liar is a line one.
PARAGRAPH B

Brando was not the first person to note that the line between an artist and a liar is a line one. If art is a
kind of lying, then lying is a form of art, albeit of a lower order-as Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain have
observed. Indeed, lying and artistic storytelling spring from a common neurological root-one that is
exposed in the cases of psychiatric patients who suffer from a particular kind of impairment. Both liars
and artists refuse to accept the tyranny of reality. Both carefully craft stories that are worthy of belief - a
skill requiring intellectual sophistication, emotional sensitivity and physical self-control (liars are writers
and performers of their own work). Such parallels are hardly coincidental, as I discovered while
researching my book on lying.
 PARAGRAPH C
A case study published in 1985 by Antonio Damasio, a neurologist, tells the story of a middle-aged woman with brain
damage caused by a series of strokes. She retained cognitive abilities, including coherent speech, but what she actually
said was rather unpredictable. Checking her knowledge of contemporary events, Damasio asked her about the Falklands
War. In the language of psychiatry, this woman was “confabulating”. Chronic confabulation is a rare type of memory
problem that affects a small proportion of brain damaged people. In the literature it is defined as "the production of
fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive”.
Whereas amnesiacs make errors of omission, there are gaps in their recollections they find impossible to fill -
confabulators make errors of commission: they make tilings up. Rather than forgetting, they are inventing. Confabulating
patients are nearly always oblivious to their own condition, and will earnestly give absurdly implausible explanations of
why they're in hospital, or talking to a doctor. One patient, asked about his surgical sear, explained that during the Second
World War he surprised a teenage girl who shot him three times in the head, killing him, only for surgery to bring him back
to life. The same patient, when asked about his family, described how at various times they had died in his arms, or had
been killed before his eyes. Others tell yet more fantastical tales, about trips to the moon, fighting alongside Alexander in
India or seeing Jesus on the Cross.  Confabulators aren’t out to deceive. They engage in what Morris Moseovitch, a
neuropsychologist, calls “honest lying". Uncertain and obscurely distressed by their uncertainty, they are seized by a
“compulsion to narrate": a deep-seated need to shape, order and explain what they do not understand. Chronic
confabulators are often highly inventive at the verbal level, jamming together words in nonsensical but suggestive
ways: one patient, when asked what happened to Queen Marie Antoinette of France, answered that she had been “suicided"
by her family. In a sense, these patients are like novelists, as described by Henry James: people on whom "nothing is
wasted". Unlike writers, however, they have little or no control over their own material.
 PARAGRAPH D
The wider significance of this condition is what it tells us about
ourselves. Evidently, there is a gushing river of verbal creativity in the
normal human mind, from which both artistic invention and lying are
drawn. We are born storytellers, spinning, narrative out of our experience
and imagination, straining against the leash that keeps us tethered to
reality. This is a wonderful thing; it is what gives us out ability to conceive
of alternative futures and different worlds. And it helps us to understand our
own lives through the entertaining stories of others. But it can lead us into
trouble, particularly when we try to persuade others that our inventions are
real. Most of the time, as our stories bubble up to consciousness, we
exercise our cerebral censors, controlling which stories we tell, and to
whom. Yet people lie for all sorts of reasons, including the fact that
confabulating can be dangerously fun.
PARAGRAPH E

During a now-famous libel case in 1996, Jonathan Aitken, a former cabinet minister, recounted a tale to
illustrate the horrors he endured after a national newspaper tainted his name. The case, which stretched
on for more than two years, involved a series of claims made by the Guardian about Aitken's
relationships with Saudi arms dealers, including meetings he allegedly held with them on a trip to Paris
while he was a government minister. What amazed many in hindsight was the sheer superfluity of the
lies Aitken told during his testimony. Aitken’s case collapsed in June 1997, when the defence finally
found indisputable evidence about his Paris trip. Until then, Aitken's charm, fluency and flair for
theatrical displays of sincerity looked as if they might bring him victory, they revealed that not only
was Aitken’s daughter not with him that day (when he was indeed doorstepped), but also that
the minister had simply got into his car and drove off, with no vehicle in pursuit.
PARAGRAPH F

Of course, unlike Aitken, actors, playwrights and novelists are not literally attempting to
deceive us, because the rules are laid out in advance: come to the theatre, or open this
book, and we'll lie to you. Perhaps this is why we fell it necessary to invent art in the first
place: as a safe space into which our lies can be corralled, and channeled into something
socially useful. Given the universal compulsion to tell stories, art is the best way to refine
and enjoy the particularly outlandish or insight till ones. But that is not the whole
story. The key way in which artistic “lies" differ from normal lies, and from the "honest
lying” of chronic confabulators, is that they have a meaning and resonance beyond their
creator. The liar lies on behalf of himself; the artist tell lies on behalf of everyone. If
writers have a compulsion to narrate, they compel themselves to find insights about the
human condition. Mario Vargas Llosa has written that novels “express a curious truth that
can only he expressed in a furtive and veiled fashion, masquerading as what it is not. ”
Art is a lie whose secret ingredient is truth.
Speaking Time!
 Art is the moonlight
deceiving, the moon is
deceiving forever
Are artists liar?
ARTISTS WERE LYING!