Hey everyone,
I got a mail from Harry Waters, an English teacher in Spain saying he liked my site. He suggested adding one thing to the Reading and Use of English Part 4 section, and I fully agree with him, so here it is!
You remember part 4 - it's the sentence transformation section. It looks like this:
Police are warning people to check for forged notes which are currently in circulation.
LOOKOUT
Police are warning people to be ....................................... forged notes which are currently in circulation.
Harry's trick is to find things that are the same in both sentences and delete them. That helps you to focus on what you actually need to be transforming.
"It seems to work all the way from PET to CPE" says Harry. "It doesn't always work because the transformations are often quite different but it CAN make a huge difference."
My advice is to try it out a few times and see if you find it helpful. Here are some examples of the process:
Example 1
Police are warning people to check for forged notes which are currently in circulation.
LOOKOUT
Police are warning people to be ....................................... forged notes which are currently in circulation.
...
Now let's delete the similar phrases:
...
Police are warning people to check for forged notes which are currently in circulation.
LOOKOUT
Police are warning people to be ....................................... forged notes which are currently in circulation.
...
Now that we've deleted all the matching phrases, we know that we need to say 'check for' using the word lookout. We can do that using the phrase 'on the lookout for'.
Police are warning people to be ... on the lookout for... forged notes which are currently in circulation.
Example 2
Rooney's performance in last week's match was nowhere near as good as it was in today's.
CONSIDERABLY
Rooney performed ....................................... he did in last week's.
...
Now let's delete the similar phrases:
...
Rooney's performance in last week's match was nowhere near as good as it was in today's.
CONSIDERABLY
Rooney performed ....................................... he did in last week's.
What's missing? match/this week/nowhere near as good
I need a phrase that means 'nowhere near as good', I need to use the word 'match', and I should mention today's match. Fortunately, I have an idea of how to do all that while using the word considerably:
Rooney performed considerably better in today's match than he did in last week's.
That's it! Give it a try and let me know if you have more questions.