IELTS Reading: Cách làm bài Matching Information chi tiết

Matching Information là dạng bài thường gặp nhất trong bài thi Reading IELTS. TDP IELTS sẽ mách nhỏ bạn cách luyện tập từ A-Z để chinh phục trọn điểm.

Chiến thuật làm bài IELTS Reading Information Matching 

Ở dạng Matching Information, bạn cần xác định vị trí của thông tin đưa ra trong câu hỏi. Đây là một dạng bài khá khó và tốn nhiều thời gian để hoàn thành.

Cách làm dạng bài Matching Information rất đơn giản, bạn chỉ cần thực hiện 5 bước dưới đây:

Bước 1: Đọc kỹ đề bài. Để ý tần suất sử dụng các lựa chọn (có “more than once” hay không)

Bước 2: Đọc câu hỏi và gạch chân các từ khóa. Cố gắng paraphrase các từ khóa này

Bước 3: Xác định vị trí đáp án (scanning) dựa vào các từ khóa và paraphrase. Đọc kỹ toàn đoạn để lọc ra thông tin cần tìm.

•       Tips:

1. Ở bước này, nếu các từ khóa quá khó để scan, bạn có thể thử đọc ngược từ đoạn văn trước, lọc ra ý chính, rồi mới đọc câu hỏi.
2. Nếu làm cách này, cố gắng đừng mắc kẹt quá lâu ở một paragraph vì có thể nó không chứa đáp án nào.

Bước 4: Chọn đáp án và ghi vào phiếu trả lời. Loại trừ dần các lựa chọn.

Bước 5: Lặp lại bước 3 và 4.

•       Tips:

1. Số lượng câu hỏi thường không đồng đều so với số đoạn văn trong bài đọc. Ví dụ: Bài đọc có 7 đoạn văn (A-G) và 5 câu hỏi (1-5)

2. Không phải đoạn văn nào cũng chứa đáp án, trong khi đoạn văn khác có thể chứa 2 đáp án. Lúc này, đề bài thường sẽ có câu “NB You can use any letter more than once”.
3. Các đáp án không theo bất kỳ trình tự nào
4. Skimming và scanning là không đủ vì đáp án có thể là một thông tin rất nhỏ chứ không phải ý chính của đoạn, và thường được paraphrase rất kỹ.
5. Vì đây là dạng bài khó và tốn nhiều thời gian, bạn nên làm những câu hỏi này sau cùng, sau khi đã trả lời được các dạng câu hỏi khác trong bài và nắm được ý chính toàn bài.

Bài tập mẫu Matching Information IELTS Reading 

How geckos cope with wet feet

A

Geckos are remarkable little lizards, clinging to almost any dry surface, and Alyssa Stark, from the University of Akron, US, explains that they appear to be equally happy scampering through tropical rainforest canopies as they are in urban settings. ‘A lot of gecko studies look at the very small adhesive structures on their toes to understand how the system works at the most basic level’; says Stark. She adds that the animals grip surfaces with microscopic hairs on the soles of their feet, which make close enough contact to be attracted to the surface by the minute forces between atoms..

B

However, she and her colleagues Timothy Sullivan and Peter Niewiarowski were curious about how the lizards cope on surfaces in their natural habitat. Explaining that previous studies had focused on the reptiles clinging to artificial dry surfaces, Stark says ‘We know they are in tropical environments that probably have a lot of rain and geckos don’t suddenly fall out of the trees when it’s wet.’Yet, the animals do seem to have trouble getting a grip on smooth, wet, artificial surfaces, sliding down wet vertical glass after several steps. The team decided to find out how geckos with wet feet cope on both wet and dry surfaces.

C

First, they had to find out how well their geckos clung onto glass with dry feet. Fitting a tiny harness around the lizard’s pelvis and gently lowering the animal onto a plate of smooth glass, Stark and Sullivan allowed the animal to become well attached before connecting the harness to a tiny motor and gently pulling the lizard until it came unstuck. The geckos hung on tenaciously, and only came unstuck at forces of around 20N – about 20 times their own body weight. “In my view, the gecko attachment system is over – designed’, says Stark.

D

Next, the trio sprayed the glass plate with a midst of water and re-tested the lizards, but this time the animals had problems holding tight. The droplets were interfering with the lizards’ attachment mechanism, but it wasn’t clear how. And when the team immersed the geckos in a bath of room – temperature water with a smooth glass bottom, the animals were completely unable to anchor themselves to the smooth surface. ‘The toes are super – hydrophobic’, (i.e. water repellant) explains Stark, who could see a silvery bubble of air around their toes. But, they were unable to displace the water around their feet to make the tight contact that usually keeps geckos in place.

E

Then the team tested the lizard’s adhesive forces on the dry surface when their feet had been soaking for 90 minutes, and found that the lizards could barely hold on, detaching when they were pulled with a force roughly equalling their own weight. ‘That might be the sliding behaviour that we see when the geckos climb vertically up misted glass’, says Stark. So, geckos climbing on wet surfaces with damp feet are constantly on the verge of slipping and Stark adds that when the soggy lizards were faced with the misted and immersed horizontal surfaces, they slipped as soon as the rig started pulling. Therefore geckos can walk on wet surfaces, as long as their feet are reasonably dry. However, as soon as their feet get wet, they are barely able to hang on, and the team is keen to understand how long  it takes geckos to recover from a drenching.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A-E, next to questions 1-7 below.

N.B You may use any letter more than once

1    visual evidence  of the gecko’s ability to resist water

2    a question that is yet to be answered by the researchers

3    the method used to calculate the gripping power of geckos

4    the researcher’s opinion of the gecko’s gripping ability

5    a mention of the different environments where geckos can be found

6    the contrast between Stark’s research and the work of other researchers

7    the definition of a scientific term

 Hướng dẫn chi tiết cách làm Matching Information 

 Matching Paragraph Information IELTS Exercise  – Luyện bài tập Matching Information 

Practice task 51

Let’s Go Bats

A

Bats have a problem: how to find their way around in the dark. They hunt at night, and cannot use light to help them find prey and avoid obstacles. You might say that this is a problem of their own making, one that they could avoid simply by changing their habits and hunting by day. But the daytime economy is already heavily exploited by other creatures such as birds. Given that there is a living to be made at night, and given that alternative daytime trades are thoroughly occupied, natural selection has favoured bats that make a go of the night-hunting trade. It is probable that the nocturnal trades go way back in the ancestry of all mammals. In the time when the dinosaurs dominated the daytime economy, our mammalian ancestors probably only managed to survive at all because they found ways of scraping a living at night. Only after the mysterious mass extinction of the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago were our ancestors able to emerge into the daylight in any substantial numbers.

B

Bats have an engineering problem: how to find their way and find their prey in the absence of light. Bats are not the only creatures to face this difficulty today. Obviously the night-flying insects that they prey on must find their way about somehow. Deep-sea fish and whales have little or no light by day or by night. Fish and dolphins that live in extremely muddy water cannot see because, although there is light, it is obstructed and scattered by the dirt in the water. Plenty of other modern animals make their living in conditions where seeing is difficult or impossible.

C

Given the questions of how to manoeuvre in the dark, what solutions might an engineer consider? The first one that might occur to him is to manufacture light, to use a lantern or a searchlight. Fireflies and some fish (usually with the help of bacteria) have the power to manufacture their own light, but the process seems to consume a large amount of energy. Fireflies use their light for attracting mates. This doesn’t require a prohibitive amount of energy: a male’s tiny pinprick of light can be seen by a female from some distance on a dark night, since her eyes are exposed directly to the light source itself. However using light to find one’s own way around requires vastly more energy, since the eyes have to detect the tiny fraction of the light that bounces off each part of the scene. The light source must therefore be immensely brighter if it is to be used as a headlight to illuminate the path, than if it is to be used as a signal to others. In any event, whether or not the reason is the energy expense, it seems to be the case that, with the possible exception of some weird deep-sea fish, no animal apart from man uses manufactured light to find its way about.

D

What else might the engineer think of? Well, blind humans sometimes seem to have an uncanny sense of obstacles in their path. It has been given the name ‘facial vision’, because blind people have reported that it feels a bit like the sense of touch, on the face. One report tells of a totally blind boy who could ride his tricycle at good speed round the block near his home, using facial vision. Experiments showed that, in fact, facial vision is nothing to do with touch or the front of the face, although the sensation may be referred to the front of the face, like the referred pain in a phantom limb. The sensation of facial vision, it turns out, really goes in through the ears. Blind people, without even being aware of the fact, are actually using echoes of their own footsteps and of other sounds, to sense the presence of obstacles. Before this was discovered, engineers had already built instruments to exploit the principle, for example to measure the depth of the sea under a ship. After this technique had been invented, it was only a matter of time before weapons designers adapted it for the detection of submarines. Both sides in the Second World War relied heavily on these devices, under such codenames as Asdic (British) and Sonar (American), as well as Radar (American) or RDF (British), which uses radio echoes rather than sound echoes.

E

The Sonar and Radar pioneers didn’t know it then, but all the world now knows that bats, or rather natural selection working on bats, had perfected the system tens of millions of years earlier, and their radar achieves feats of detection and navigation that would strike an engineer dumb with admiration. It is technically incorrect to talk about bat ‘radar’, since they do not use radio waves. It is sonar but the underlying mathematical theories of radar and sonar are very similar and much of our scientific understanding of the details of what bats are doing has come from applying radar theory to them. The American zoologist Donald Griffin, who was largely responsible for the discovery of sonar in bats, coined the term ‘echolocation’ to cover both sonar and radar, whether used by animals or by human instruments.

Reading Passage 1 has five paragraphs, A-E. Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter. A-E, in boxes 1-5 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

1. Examples of wildlife other than bats which do not rely on vision to navigate by
2. How early mammals avoided dying out
3. Why bats hunt in the dark
4. How a particular discovery has helped our understanding of bats
5. Early military uses of echolocation

Practice test 52

A Chronicle of Timekeeping

A

According to archaeological evidence, at least 5,000 years ago, and long before the advent of the Roman Empire, the Babylonians began to measure time, introducing calendars to co-ordinate communal activities, to plan the shipment of goods and, in particular, to regulate planting and harvesting. They based their calendars on three natural cycles: the solar day, marked by the successive periods of light and darkness as the earth rotates on its axis; the lunar month, following the phases of the moon as it orbits the earth; and the solar year, defined by the changing seasons that accompany our planet’s revolution around the sun.

B

Before the invention of artificial light, the moon had greater social impact. And, for those living near the equator in particular, its waxing and waning was more conspicuous than the passing of the seasons. Hence, the calendars that were developed at the lower latitudes were influenced more by the lunar cycle than by the solar year. In more northern climes, however, where seasonal agriculture was practised, the solar year became more crucial. As the Roman Empire expanded northward, it organised its activity chart for the most part around the solar year.

C

Centuries before the Roman Empire, the Egyptians had formulated a municipal calendar having 12 months of 30 days, with five days added to approximate the solar year. Each period of ten days was marked by the appearance of special groups of stars called decans. At the rise of the star Sirius just before sunrise, which occurred around the all-important annual flooding of the Nile, 12 decans could be seen spanning the heavens. The cosmic significance the Egyptians placed in the 12 decans led them to develop a system in which each interval of darkness (and later, each interval of daylight) was divided into a dozen equal parts. These periods became known as temporal hours because their duration varied according to the changing length of days and nights with the passing of the seasons. Summer hours were long, winter ones short; only at the spring and autumn equinoxes were the hours of daylight and darkness equal. Temporal hours, which were first adopted by the Greeks and then the Romans, who disseminated them through Europe, remained in use for more than 2,500 years.

D

In order to track temporal hours during the day, inventors created sundials, which indicate time by the length or direction of the sun’s shadow. The sundial’s counterpart, the water clock, was designed to measure temporal hours at night. One of the first water clocks was a basin with a small hole near the bottom through which the water dripped out. The falling water level denoted the passing hour as it dipped below hour lines inscribed on the inner surface. Although these devices performed satisfactorily around the Mediterranean, they could not always be depended on in the cloudy and often freezing weather of northern Europe.

 E

The advent of the mechanical clock meant that although it could be adjusted to maintain temporal hours, it was naturally suited to keeping equal ones. With these, however, arose the question of when to begin counting, and so, in the early 14th century, a number of systems evolved. The schemes that divided the day into 24 equal parts varied according to the start of the count: Italian hours began at sunset, Babylonian hours at sunrise, astronomical hours at midday and ‘great clock’ hours, used for some large public clocks in Germany, at midnight. Eventually these were superseded by ‘small clock’, or French, hours, which split the day into two 12-hour periods commencing at midnight.

F

The earliest recorded weight-driven mechanical clock was built in 1283 in Bedfordshire in England. The revolutionary aspect of this new timekeeper was neither the descending weight that provided its motive force nor the gear wheels (which had been around for at least 1,300 years) that transferred the power; it was the part called the escapement. In the early 1400s came the invention of the coiled spring or fusee which maintained constant force to the gear wheels of the timekeeper despite the changing tension of its mainspring. By the 16th century, a pendulum clock had been devised, but the pendulum swung in a large arc and thus was not very efficient.

G

To address this, a variation on the original escapement was invented in 1670, in England. It was called the anchor escapement, which was a lever-based device shaped like a ship’s anchor. The motion of a pendulum rocks this device so that it catches and then releases each tooth of the escape wheel, in turn allowing it to turn a precise amount. Unlike the original form used in early pendulum clocks, the anchor escapement permitted the pendulum to travel in a very small arc. Moreover, this invention allowed the use of a long pendulum which could beat once a second and thus led to the development of a new floor standing case design, which became known as the grandfather clock.

H

Today, highly accurate timekeeping instruments set the beat for most electronic devices. Nearly all computers contain a quartz-crystal clock to regulate their operation. Moreover, not only do time signals beamed down from Global Positioning System satellites calibrate the functions of precision navigation equipment, they do so as well for mobile phones, instant stock-trading systems and nationwide power-distribution grids. So integral have these time-based technologies become to day-to-day existence that our dependency on them is recognised only when they fail to work.

Reading Passage 1 has eight paragraphs, A-H. Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter, A-H, in boxes 1- 4 on your answer sheet.

1. a description of an early timekeeping invention affected by cold temperatures
2. an explanation of the importance of geography in the development of the calendar in farming communities
3. a description of the origins of the pendulum clock
4. details of the simultaneous efforts of different societies to calculate time using uniform hours

Practice test 53

Venus in Transit

June 2004 saw the first passage., known as a ‘transit` of the planet Venus across the face of the Sun in  122 years. Transits have helped shape our view of the whole Universe, as Heather Cooper and Nigel Henbest explain

A

On 8 June 2004, more than half the population of the world were treated to a rare astronomical event. For over six hours, the planet Venus steadily inched its way over the surface of the Sun. This “transit` of Venus was the first since 6 December l882. On that occasion, the American astronomer Professor Simon Newcomb led a party to South Africa to observe the event. They were based at a girls’ school, where – if is alleged – the combined forces of three schoolmistresses outperformed the professionals with the accuracy of their observations.

B

For centuries, transits of Venus have drawn explorers and astronomers alike to the four corners of the globe. And you can put it all down to the extraordinary polymath Edmond Halley.  In November 1677, Halley observed a transit of the innermost planet Mercury, from the desolate island of St Helena in the South Pacific. .He realized that from different latitudes, the passage of the planet across the Sun’s disc would appear to differ. By timing the transit from two widely-separated locations, teams of astronomers could calculate the parallax angle – the apparent difference in position of an astronomical body due to a difference in the observer’s position. Calculating this angle would allow astronomers to measure what was then the ultimate goal; the distance of the Earth from the Sun. This distance is known as the ‘astronomical unit` or AU.

C

Halley was aware that the AU was one of the most fundamental of all astronomical measurements. Johannes Kepler, in the early 17*h century, had shown that the distances of the planets from the Sun governed their orbital speeds, which were easily measurable. But no-one had found a way to calculate accurate distances to the planets from the Earth. The goal was to measure the AU; then, knowing the orbital speeds of all the other planets around the Sun, the scale of the Solar System would fall into place. However, Halley realized that Mercury was so far away that its parallax angle would be very difficult to determine. As Venus was closer to the Earth, its parallax angle would be larger and Halley worked out that by using Venus it would be possible to measure the Sun’s distance to 1 part in 500. But there was a problem: transits of Venus, unlike those of Mercury, are rare. occurring in pairs roughly eight years apart every hundred or so years. Nevertheless, he accurately predicted that Venus would cross the face of the Sun in both 1761 and 1769 – though he didn’t survive to see either.

D

Inspired by Halley’s suggestion of a way to pin down the scale of the Solar System, teams of British and French astronomers set out on expeditions to places as diverse as India and Siberia. But things weren’t helped by Britain and France being at war. The person who deserves most sympathy is the French astronomer Guillaume Le Gentil. He was thwarted by the fact that the British were besieging his observation site at Pondicherry in India. Fleeing on a French warship crossing the Indian Ocean, Le Gentil saw a wonderful transit – but the ship`s pitching and rolling ruled out any attempt at making accurate observations. Undaunted, he remained south of the equator, keeping himself busy by studying the islands of Mauritius and Madagascar before setting off to observe the next transit in the Philippines. Ironically after travelling nearly 50,000 kilometres, his view was clouded out at the last moment, a very dispiriting experience.

E

While the early transit timings were as precise as instruments would allow, the measurements were dogged by the ‘black drop’ effect. When Venus begins to cross the Sun’s disc, it looks smeared not circular – which makes it difficult to establish timings. This is due to diffraction of light. The second problem is that Venus exhibits a halo of light when it is seen just outside the Sun’s disc. While this showed astronomers that Venus was surrounded by a thick layer of gases refracting sunlight around it, both effects made it impossible to obtain accurate timings.

F

But astronomers labored hard to analyze the results of these expeditions to observe Venus transits. Jonathan Franz Encke, Director of the Belin Observatory, finally determined a value for the AU based on all these parallax measurements: 153340,000 km. Reasonably accurate for the time, that is quite close to today’s value of 149,597,870 km, determined by radar, which has now superseded transits and all other methods in accuracy. The AU is a cosmic measuring rod, and the basis of how we scale the Universe today The parallax principle can be extended to measure the distances to the stars. If we look at a star in January – when Earth is at one point in its orbit – it will seem to be in a different position from where it appears six months later. Knowing the width of Earth’s orbit, the parallax shift lets astronomers calculate the distance.

G

June 2004’s transit of Venus was thus more of an astronomical spectacle than a scientifically important event. But such transits have paved the way for what might prove to be one of the most vital breakthroughs in the cosmos – detecting Earth-sized planets orbiting other stars.

Reading Passage has seven paragraphs, A-G.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

1. examples of different ways in which the parallax principle has been applied
2. a description of an event which prevented a transit observation
3. a statement about potential future discoveries leading on from transit observations
4. a description of physical states connected with Venus which early astronomical instruments failed to overcome.

Xem thêm: Cách Viết Mở Bài Writing Task 2 Chi Tiết Nhất

Lời kết

Trên đây là toàn bộ tài liệu hướng dẫn cách làm IELTS General Reading Matching Information do TDP IELTS tổng hợp lại. Nếu cần luyện tập thêm, bạn có thể tham khảo các tài liệu General training reading sample task matching information trên internet hoặc theo dõi Fanpage TDP – IELTS cấp tốc nhé!