Better understanding synonyms and improving your paraphrasing ability is definitely going to help you to succeed in the IELTS Reading test.
Improving your skills in this area will help across all questions, but will particularly aid you in summary completion tasks.
Summary completion tasks require you to read a passage of text and then apply your understanding of the text to a task.
The task will either ask you to select the correct word from a list of provided words that best fit in the summary (based on the information in the main passage) or it will ask you to locate a word or words from the original text to insert into a summary in the correct place.
Tips for this task!
- The summary sentences normally follow the order of the original text. This should give you a rough idea of where to find the answer in the text.
- You don’t need to worry if you don’t understand every part of the text – as long as you can identify the main ideas and supporting facts
- The summary sentence must make grammatical sense, so consider whether the gap requires a noun, verb, adjective etc. This will help you to narrow the selection of words that would work in the gap
- Don’t spend too long reading the original passage and trying to understand every part. As long as you get the main ‘gist’ of the text, you will be able to complete the summary task
- Do plenty of synonym and paraphrasing practice ahead of the Reading test!
- Spend more of your time reading the summary sentence, finding the information in the original text and identifying the word needed to fill the gap.
- Make sure you read the instructions carefully as the exact task changes every time. Particularly pay attention to how you are asked to record your answer. Sometimes you may need to write out the word/s and at other times you may just need to write the words corresponding letter. At other times, if you are asked to find words from the original text to go in the gap, it may specify no more than one/two/three words so make sure you are choosing and recording the correct number of words!
Dinosaur Institute
The Dinosaur Institute (DI) houses the museum’s collection of Mesozoic tetrapods, dating from 250 million years ago to 65.5 million years ago.
This collection includes fossils of dinosaurs spanning the Mesozoic Era, as well as fossils of other tetrapods that lived alongside the dinosaurs, such as flying and marine reptiles, crocodiles, turtles, amphibians, and early mammals.
The fossils in our collection have been acquired over nearly a century, and the collection continues to expand rapidly through the Dinosaur Institute’s very active field program.
The DI runs expeditions several times a year to collect fossils from Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and Utah. We also participate in international field programs, most recently in China, South Africa and Argentina.
The DI staff provides mentorship in palaeontology for a diverse group of people, from volunteers and docents to undergraduate students and postdoctoral fellows.
A wide range of research is conducted here at the museum by both staff and visiting researchers, from examining different aspects of the evolution of dinosaurs and other Mesozoic animals to investigations into their diversity, genealogical relationships, ecology, and life history.
Source: https://nhm.org/research-collections/departments/dinosaur-institute
Questions:
Find synonyms for the following words/phrases in the passage above.
four-limbed animals:______________
with:___________________
obtained:__________________
grow: ________________
organises:_______________
take part in:___________________
mixed:______________
features:______________
ancestral:________________
Answers:
four-limbed animals: tetrapods
with: alongside
obtained: acquired
grow: expand
organises: runs
take part in: participate
mixed: diverse
features: aspects
ancestral: genealogical