Marker’s Report for Comprehension

1991 Home Sweet Home

Problems with the Candidate

1. Summarizing Cloze (Question 5)

Candidate failed to referring back to the passage to choose the most appropriate words.

Although the words given by the candidate could be grammatically and contextually

possible for the blanks, it did not give to best meaning according to the passage.

(“suspicions” versus “protests”: “protests” usually involve stronger emotions, and most

often have done something physically to against something, while “suspicions” is a way

milder than “protests”; “investigation” versus “comparisons”: “investigation” does not

involve the meaning of comparisons, unless otherwise specified.)

2. Reference (Question 7)

Candidate failed to referring some noun phrases back into the passage.

3. Giving reasons to support (Question 9)

Candidate failed to give enough reasons to support his statement (More precisely, the

candidate failed to “count” the number of reasons), and this has been seen more than

once in some previous exercises. When asking for more reasons, most obviously

candidates cannot just give one sentence to provide two reasons. It is suggested the

candidate can in fact write more sentences to give more distinct reasons. (e.g. Throughout

the passage the writer gave several positive effects of home-working OR the writer tried to

provide possible adjustments to be made by workers and bosses to improve the situation

of home-working - which both show that the writer is optimistic towards home-working)

“in spite of this” Candidate can indeed

1991 Rediscovering Primates

5. Identifying the part of speech (Question 6)

Word meaning “extremely thorough and careful” should be an adjective. While in the

passage, “overturned” should be a verb (in past participle form only). Possible adjectives in

the paragraph include “rigorous”, “legitimate”, and “all-important”. The one which suits the

meaning most in the paragraph should be rigorous (since it is describing scientific

standards).

6. Identify the part of speech (Question 8)

“It is because legitimate the aim of primatology …” Candidates should be able to identify

the part of speech error in this sentence. We can say “the legitimate aim”, but we cannot

put the adjective “legitimate” before the “the”. In order to change this we may say

“legitimately the aim of primatology …”

The same problem lies on the