Chiến thuật IELTS Reading – Dạng 7: Matching Sentence Endings – Excellent Tips for Matching Sentence Endings

Trong bài viết này, IPP sẽ hướng dẫn chiến thuật làm bài dạng Matching Sentence Endings để đạt band điểm cao trong IELTS Reading. 

Chiến thuật IELTS Reading – Dạng Matching Sentence Endings

1. Các bước làm bài dạng Matching Sentence Endings trong IELTS Reading

+ STEP 01: phân tích các keywords trong câu cần điền và trong các dữ liệu của bài => xác định các key words độc nhất ví dụ như năm, tên riêng, số lượng để chọn xem rà dữ liệu nào trước. Với các câu dễ locating, bạn cần làm trước và cross out đáp án, để có hướng locate vị trí của các câu còn lại. 

+ STEP 02: với các câu còn lại, bắt đầu locating và so sánh giữa text trong bài với đối tượng cần kiếm để chọn đúng thông tin. 

QUESTIONS

1. After reforms, most mails was
2. Each steel printing plate was [locating dễ] 
3. Every penny black was
4. Putting a letter in an envelope was [locating dễ] 
5. Keeping the borders of each stamp was

1. unusual in 1840. => QUAN TRỌNG!! rà key words này trước để xem đáp án nằm ở đoạn văn nào để chặn đoạn cho các câu hỏi khác => chỉ xuất hiện trong đoạn H => as it should be remembered that in 1840 the use of envelopes was unusual, most letters being written, folded, and sealed with sealing wax. => chắc chắn đây là trả lời cho câu số 4 => câu số 5 ở sau đoạn văn H
2. able to print sheets of 240 stamps. => QUAN TRỌNG!! rà key words này trước để xem đáp án nằm ở đoạn văn nào để chặn đoạn cho các câu hỏi khác => chỉ xuất hiện trong đoạn F => The stamps were printed in sheets of 240, engraved on steel plates, on gummed paper with a single small crown watermark on each stamp. => chắc chắn đây là trả lời cho câu số 2 => câu số 3 ở sau đoạn F và câu số 1 ở trước đoạn văn F
3. paid for by the sender.
4. very difficult to achieve.
5. very expensive to send.
6. designed with two letters in the bottom corners.
7. quickly accepted.

READING TEXT

The Penny Black

A.

In 1840, the United Kingdom introduced the penny black, the first adhesive postage stamp issued anywhere in the world. For many years the postal service in the U.K. had been a very expensive service for ordinary people to use. The costs were prohibitive, a single letter sometimes costing a working person’s full day’s wage. The postal system also had many strange anomalies, such as certain categories of mail going free (and therefore being paid for by the charges on others), newspapers going for nothing, most mail being paid for by the addressee rather than by the sender, and so on.

B.

There were moves for postal reform for many years (giới thiệu có reforms), until eventually these moves started gathering some force through the attention of many, amongst whom Rowland Hill is the best known, and Robert Wallace, MP for Greenock, was instrumental.

C.

The story is long and involved, but eventually, The Penny Postage Bill was passed by Parliament on 17 August 1839 (đây là “reform”). Some basic elements of the plan were the lowering of postage rates for basic letters to one penny, the removal of certain idiosyncrasies, that prepayment would become normal, and the availability of printed envelopes, letter sheets, and labels to show prepayment [Q1]. The “labels” were the penny black and twopence blue.

D.

A bookseller and printer from Dundee, James Chalmers, holds a strong claim to be the actual inventor of the adhesive postage stamp. He is said to have been interested in postal reform from about 1822, and to have printed samples of his idea for printed gummed labels in August 1834. It seems that, although Hill also presented the idea of adhesive stamps, he was probably keener on the use of standard prepaid letter folders, such as were issued in 1840 using a design by William Mulready.

E.

The new stamps went on sale on 1st May 1840 and were valid for postage from 6th May 1840 (although some were used during the 1st-5th May period). The Mulreadies were issued at the same time. Public reaction to these new items was quite the opposite to Rowland Hill’s expectations. The labels were well-received and admired; the Mulready design was lambasted and ridiculed. Initial supplies of the stamps were rushed through the printing and distribution process, but supplies soon caught up with requirements.

F.

The stamps were printed in sheets of 240, engraved on steel plates, on gummed paper with a single small crown watermark on each stamp [Q2]. Eleven different printing plates were used, and it is possible in almost every case to work out which plate any individual stamp was printed from by a few characteristics. Things like the positioning of the corner letters within their squares, the presence of the “O flaw”, which rays of the stars in the upper corners are broken at what points, and so on, can point to a correct plate identification, but more specialised literature is required in order to do this. Some plates are scarcer than others, plate 11 being the scarcest.

G.

Every penny black stamp has letters in the lower two corners [Q3]. These simply identify what sheet position the stamp occupied. When the printing plates were produced the lower squares were blank, and the letters were punched in by hand. The left square letter shows which horizontal row the stamp was in – the first row being A, the second B, and so on down to the twentieth row with T. The right square letter indicates the vertical column, again with A for the first column, B, C, and so on across to L for the last (twelfth) column. It should be noted therefore that each letter combination is just as common or as scarce as any other.

H.

There were 68,158,080 penny blacks issued (yes, 68 million!), and even with only a 2% survival rate, there are likely to be about 1.3 million still in existence. The survival rate may well be considerably higher than 2%, as it should be remembered that in 1840 the use of envelopes was unusual, most letters being written, folded, and sealed with sealing wax [Q4]; this meant that whenever a letter was filed in a lawyer’s office, bank, etc., the whole thing would be kept – letter and outer cover including the adhesive stamp.

I.

From the collector’s perspective, the physical condition of the stamp – any fault such as a thin, tear, crease, or stain will lower the value, and the number, size, and regularity of the margins make a big difference to value. The stamps were not perforated and had to be separated using scissors or a knife. As there was only about 1mm between one stamp and another, it was very easy to stray just a little and cut into the printed design of the stamp [Q5]. A stamp with two full margins and perhaps a couple of other part margins is about average. Collectors will pay higher prices for examples with four good, wide, and even margins.

VOCABULARY LIST

• adhesive (adj.): dính
• addressee (n.): người nhận 
• element (n.): yếu tố, thành tố
• public reaction (n.): phản ứng của người dân
• be rushed through (v.): bị hối thúc làm cho nhanh
• plate identification (n.): nhận dạng tấm (in) – “tấm stickers/tấm stamps” 
• Scarce (adj.):  khan hiếm
• punched in (v.): nhấn/đấm vào
• Perspective (n.): viễn cảnh/góc nhìn
• Margins (n.): mép/rìa
• Fault (n.): lỗi lầm
• Crease (n.): vết nhăn/vết nhàu
• Stain (n.): vết bẩn
• prohibitive (adj): bị cấm
• postal (adj) reform (n): cải cách bưu chính
• idiosyncrasies (n):đặc điểm riêng
• prepayment (n): khoản trả trước  
• adhesive (adj): dính
• lambasted (adj): chê bai
• ridiculed (adj): chế giễu
• sealed (adj): được niêm phong
• perforated (adj): đục lỗ
  

Questions 01 – 05 

Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A–G, below.

Write the correct letter, A-G, as your answer to each question. 

1. After reforms, most mails was
2. Each steel printing plate was
3. Every penny black was
4. Putting a letter in an envelope was
5. Keeping the borders of each stamp was

1. unusual in 1840.
2. able to print sheets of 240 stamps.
3. paid for by the sender.
4. very difficult to achieve.
5. very expensive to send.
6. designed with two letters in the bottom corners.
7. quickly accepted.

KEY & EXPLANATION

2. Practice test

Questions 01 – 04 [Duration: 15 mins]

GREAT MIGRATIONS

Animal migration, however it is defined, is far more than just the movement of animals. It can loosely be described as travel that takes place at regular intervals – often in an annual cycle – that may involve many members of a species, and is rewarded only after a long journey. It suggests inherited instinct. The biologist Hugh Dingle has identified five characteristics that apply, in varying degrees and combinations, to all migrations. They are prolonged movements that carry animals outside familiar habitats; they tend to be linear, not zigzaggy; they involve special behaviours concerning preparation (such as overfeeding) and arrival; they demand special allocations of energy. And one more: migrating animals maintain an intense attentiveness to the greater mission, which keeps them undistracted by temptations and undeterred by challenges that would turn other animals aside.

An arctic tern, on its 20,000 km flight from the extreme south of South America to the Arctic circle, will take no notice of a nice smelly herring offered from a bird-watcher’s boat along the way. While local gulls will dive voraciously for such handouts, the tern flies on. Why? The arctic tern resists distraction because it is driven at that moment by an instinctive sense of something we humans find admirable: larger purpose. In other words, it is determined to reach its destination. The bird senses that it can eat, rest and mate later. Right now it is totally focused on the journey; its undivided intent is arrival.

Reaching some gravelly coastline in the Arctic, upon which other arctic terns have converged, will serve its larger purpose as shaped by evolution: finding a place, a time, and a set of circumstances in which it can successfully hatch and rear offspring.

But migration is a complex issue, and biologists define it differently, depending in part on what sorts of animals they study. Joe! Berger, of the University of Montana, who works on the American pronghorn and other large terrestrial mammals, prefers what he calls a simple, practical definition suited to his beasts: ‘movements from a seasonal home area away to another home area and back again’. Generally the reason for such seasonal back-and-forth movement is to seek resources that aren’t available within a single area year-round.

But daily vertical movements by zooplankton in the ocean – upward by night to seek food, downward by day to escape predators – can also be considered migration. So can the movement of aphids when, having depleted the young leaves on one food plant, their offspring then fly onward to a different host plant, with no one aphid ever returning to where it started.

Dingle is an evolutionary biologist who studies insects. His definition is more intricate than Berger’s, citing those five features that distinguish migration from other forms of movement. They allow for the fact that, for example, aphids will become sensitive to blue light (from the sky) when it’s time for takeoff on their big journey, and sensitive to yellow light (reflected from tender young leaves) when it’s appropriate to land. Birds will fatten themselves with heavy feeding in advance of a long migrational flight. The value of his definition, Dingle argues, is that it focuses attention on what the phenomenon of wildebeest migration shares with the phenomenon of the aphids, and therefore helps guide researchers towards understanding how evolution has produced them all.

Human behaviour, however, is having a detrimental impact on animal migration. The pronghorn, which resembles an antelope, though they are unrelated, is the fastest land mammal of the New World. One population, which spends the summer in the mountainous Grand Teton National Park of the western USA, follows a narrow route from its summer range in the mountains, across a river, and down onto the plains. Here they wait out the frozen months, feeding mainly on sagebrush blown clear of snow. These pronghorn are notable for the invariance of their migration route and the severity of its constriction at three bottlenecks. If they can’t pass through each of the three during their spring migration, they can’t reach their bounty of summer grazing; if they can’t pass through again in autumn, escaping south onto those windblown plains, they are likely to die trying to overwinter in the deep snow. Pronghorn, dependent on distance vision and speed to keep safe from predators, traverse high, open shoulders of land, where they can see and run. At one of the bottlenecks, forested hills rise to form a V, leaving a corridor of open ground only about 150 metres wide, filled with private homes. Increasing development is leading toward a crisis for the pronghorn, threatening to choke off their passageway.

Conservation scientists, along with some biologists and land managers within the USA’s National Park Service and other agencies, are now working to preserve migrational behaviours, not just species and habitats. A National Forest has recognised the path of the pronghorn, much of which passes across its land, as a protected migration corridor. But neither the Forest Service nor the Park Service can control what happens on private land at a bottleneck. And with certain other migrating species, the challenge is complicated further – by vastly greater distances traversed, more jurisdictions, more borders, more dangers along the way. We will require wisdom and resoluteness to ensure that migrating species can continue their journeying a while longer.

VOCABULARY LIST

• inherited (adj) instinct (n): bản năng di truyền
• linear (n): đường thẳng
• temptation (n): sự cám dỗ
• voraciously (adv): lặn lội
• arctic terns (n): nhạn biển Bắc cực
• terrestrial (adj): trên cạn
• aphids (n): rệp
• offspring (n): con non
• intricate (adj): phức tạp
• phenomenon (n): hiện tượng
• wildebeest (n): linh dương đầu bò
• pronghorn (n): sừng nhọn
• resembles (v): trông giống
• antelope (n): con linh dương
• bottlenecks (n): tình huống không mong muốn nhưng lại dễ xảy ra 
• resoluteness (n): sự kiên quyết
• Prolonged (adj.) movements (n.): chuyển động kéo dài
• Zigzaggy (adj.): ngoằn ngoèo
• Instinctive (adj.): như bản năng
• Resists (v.) distraction (n.): chống lại sự phân tâm 
• Invariance (n.): sự bất biến
• Passageway (n.): lối đi
• Traverse (v.): đi qua
  

Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-G, below.

Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 01-04 on your answer sheet.

1. According to Dingle, migratory routes are likely to …………………
2. To prepare for migration, animals are likely to……………………
3. During migration, animals are unlikely to……………………..
4. Arctic terns illustrate migrating animals’ ability to……………………….

1. be discouraged by difficulties.
2. travel on open land where they can look out for predators.
3. eat more than they need for immediate purposes.
4. be repeated daily.
5. ignore distractions.
6. be governed by the availability of water.
7. follow a straight line.

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