Learning and Teaching

Kamis, 07 Mei 2015

My Writing Task 1 Practices

by Aziza Restu Febrianto

February 2015

The table illustrates some date gained by a university bookshop in February 2000.

The data shows three different kinds of books bought by non-book club members in a month. It can be clearly seen from the data that magazines were the most popular books among non-book club members. In contrast, the book club members apparently did not quite like them. There were only 33 books bought by the members.

Compared to Magazines, non-fiction books were the most popular among the book club members. 942 books were sold. As shown in the data, among the non-book members, group of people who like it best were college students (194).

On the other hand, fiction was the least preference among the both different people. The number of the book sold was 151, and only those from college staff and students liked it. College staff (44) and college students (31).

It is clear that these three different books were quite popular among people in university with 3134 books sold.

(165 words)

February 2015

The graph illustrates the data on the rate of children watching TV and listening to radio every day and night reported in 1994.

According to the data, it can easily be seen that radio became so popular in the morning. The number of students listening to radio increased dramatically from 6.00 am to about 8.15 am. However, as is shown in the figures, the percentage of children listening to radio declined gradually after 8.15 from 25% to less than 11%. And it also shows that radio became little popular from afternoon to evening for children.

On the other hand, we can see from the graph that children liked watching TV from afternoon to evening. The data shows that the percentage of children above 4 years old rose significantly after 4 pm and reached a peak at over 45%. However, TV became unpopular after 8.00 pm for children, and the percentage dramatically decreased until 2 am. This was probably because children of age above 4 had a rest and slept early after having a lot of activities all day long before.

(180 words)

April 18, 2015

The pie chart and the figure illustrate the Coca Cola products distribution and share prices from 1996 to 2000 in five different countries.

The pie chart shows that the total products distribution across the five different continents in four years was 17.1 bn with the highest rate intake in the North America (30.7 bn). The second place was Latin America with 25.7 bn, and the three remaining continents were Europe (20.5 bn), Asia (16.4 bn) and Africa and Middle East (7.0 bn) of the total products distribution.

The figure shows the data of Coca Cola share prices from 1996 to 2000. It can be seen from the data that the peak of price was reached in 1998 with the price around 75 dollars. In the beginning of 1996, Coca cola firstly started the price around 32 dollars, and it significantly increased almost 70 dollars in a year. Even though the price slightly declined a bit in several months, the company could successfully push the price and significantly reached 70 dollars before the peak in 1998. However, it shows that the company was not able to maintain the price and it finally dropped gradually from 1998 to 2000. It was shown in the figure that there was an effort to increase the price from 49 dollars to over 56 dollars before 2001.

(220 words)

Just keep writing! ...:)

Rabu, 06 Mei 2015

Writing Practice 1

Reading as part of writing

One of the techniques of writing successfully in academic environment is to be able to integrate the important points of what you have read into your own writing. To do this, you must have a clear picture of what you have read, and this in itself entails active and focused reading. With academic reading, it is necessary to maintain a constant grip on what the author is saying. Yet many academic texts are densely written in unfamiliar ways, which make them much more difficult to manage than, for example a novel or a magazine article.

Although sometimes there may be reasons why you need to skim-read an article or book, this is likely to be only to get the gist of what is being said, as a way of deciding whether it is appropriate reading material or not. In general, skim-reading is not a particularly useful strategy for a student, but you may well be used to doing this in other contexts, for example, skimming through a newspaper article or surfing the web. Instead of skim-reading, you will be developing ways of concentrating on large chunks of quite dense text and making sense of them.

Even though you may only be reading for short burst of time, it is likely that you will have to concentrate far more intensely on academic reading material than, for example, when reading for pleasure. You don’t necessarily have to work in the library, but you will need to decide what type of location and atmosphere suits you best, and establish conditions that are conducive to effective study.

The initial stumbling block that most students face is choosing their reading. The first thing to do is to consult the reading list you have been given for books and articles that seem relevant to your particular assignment. Doing a library search, by keywords or subjects, is also useful if the references on your reading list are already on loan from the library. Your tutor should also be able to advise you as to which are the most relevant publications or websites.

Minggu, 23 November 2014

Writing practice (Day 1)

Typing on net book screen

Writing 1

Independent writing

30 minutes

227 words

Topic: Do you agree with the following statement? Advertisement can tell you a lot about a country. Use specific reasons and examples to support your opinion.

I disagree with a statement that we can get a lot of information about a country through advertisement because it is not the only way we can do for that. The followings are some reasons I provide.

Firstly, advertisement just gives us general information about a certain country not the details. In order to get people interested in visiting a country, advertisement plays a very important role. The information given by the advertisement has a strong effect to make people curious about what the country looks like. Therefore, it the information in the advertisement does not need to be detailed.

Secondly, we can get a lot of detailed information from other people. We will find a lot of things about a country from the people who live in it through chats and asking some questions about it. We do not need to visit the country to meet the people. We can just ask our friends who come from the country or experience visiting the country before.

Thirdly, the information of a country can also be gained by accessing the official website of a country. To get a lot of details, internet is really helpful. We can actually visit the country official website or some other sites which provide information related to it. In addition, they have some menus we can click and access to get what we need.

Bloody weekends ahead: TOEFL iBT preparation

One step closer to TOEFL iBT test

(Day 1)

In order to get an opportunity to study overseas or to get a promising job, we need to meet the qualifications needed by the institution or company we would like to apply. Some developed institutions or companies usually require the candidates to have good standard language competence before considering the other components of qualifications that they have.

Language competence is measured by the score of TOEFL, IELTS, GRE, or GMAT that the candidates have. It means that the candidates have to make sure they take one of the English tests, depending on which test the institution or company needs before applying. And certainly, each institution or company has different standard score of language test for all candidates.

I believe that there are always many overseas studies including scholarships and job opportunities offered every year. It is obviously a great idea to get myself prepared to the qualifications that the institutions or companies commonly set in advance by the end of the year. Hence, taking TOEFL iBT test is the first thing I need to consider before thinking of the other qualifications. To get the score which is above the average is a challenge. And it is going to be my first experience, for I never took this sort of test before. I firstly assumed that the test would be like the other similar one that I have taken before, TOEFL PBT (Paper Based TOEFL). But in fact, it is totally different after I searched information about it through friends and internet. The basic thing that makes them different is the TOEFL iBT requires computer and internet for the test, but the TOEFL PBT does not. There are no speaking and writing sections in TOEFL PBT. And in TOEFL iBT, structure or grammar section is not included.

Since I am not quite familiar with this sort of test, the best thing I need to do is just getting myself well prepared. Taking a TOEFL iBT placement test as a simulation in advance will be very helpful. Besides, buying some books, downloading materials and videos about the tips and strategies from reliable websites and doing some exercises and practices are going to be the only actions to take during the preparation time before taking the real test. I plan to take the test next year by January 2015. Therefore, I actually have three months of preparation. By a consultation with some experienced people and the institution which provide TOEFL test and its preparation, I decided to take a simulation test within this month. And the date is November 22, 2014. And it’s time to work hard. Wish me luck, guys!