Review 1: paraphrase and reading
The book’s translation items ask you to choose a sentence with the same meaning. We practise the same skill in English, which is called paraphrasing. To paraphrase a sentence, keep the meaning and the key facts, change the words and change the structure. “Machines make school tasks quicker, but pupils must still learn to think for themselves” can become: “Although devices help pupils to finish work faster, they should still practise independent thinking.” Here quicker became faster, machines became devices, and the but sentence became an although sentence. Never copy whole phrases and never add new facts. Then practise a reading text: read the questions first, find the main idea, find details, and for an inference question think about what the text suggests but does not say. Your book has a reading text on pages 51 and 52 and translation items on pages 50 and 51; do them after this lesson.
| Step | What to do |
|---|---|
| 1 Understand | Read the sentence and find its key facts. |
| 2 Change the words | Use synonyms for the important words. |
| 3 Change the structure | Use a different pattern or a linking word. |
| 4 Check | Are all the facts and the meaning the same? |
Every Friday at lunchtime, a small group of pupils gather in room 6 to run the school radio. The club began last year with one microphone, a borrowed speaker and a lot of nerves. The first broadcast was a disaster: the microphone buzzed, a pupil sneezed at the wrong moment, and the sound did not reach the yard. Mr Fathy, the club adviser, did not complain. He asked the pupils to listen to the recording and to write down three things to improve. They learned to speak slowly, to keep a script in front of them and to test the speaker before the show. By the end of the term the broadcasts were clear, and pupils began to request songs and send questions. Now the club has twelve members, and a younger pupil reads the weather forecast every Monday. The members say that the best part is not the music but the feeling of working together for a shared goal.
Paraphrase it. Choose three sentences from a school book. Rewrite each one in different words and with a different structure, without changing a fact. Ask a grown-up to check that the key facts are the same.