Reading Section: Paraphrase Questions
When answering paraphrase questions in the reading section, it helps to know how to break the original sentence down into smaller grammatical units. For example, a really long sentence like “Since 2004, Jon, who is my teacher at Strictly English, has been winning awards, from the National Council on Education, for his excellent teaching” can be broken down into smaller parts:
Since 2004, Jon, who is my English teacher at Strictly English, has been winning awards, from the National Council on Education, for his excellent teaching.
Although this sentence appears long, it has a smaller “sentence” (what we call an independent clause) inside it: Jon has been winning awards for his excellent teaching and three smaller “ideas” in it:
Since 2004
who is my English teacher at Strictly English
from the Nation Council on Education
Now you can focus on one idea at a time and make sure it matches the paraphrase. For example, an answer choice will be wrong if it says “before 2004″ or “in 2004″ because “since” does not mean the same thing as “before” or “in”. You don’t need to look at the rest of the answer choice if this first part doesn’t match!
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