IELTS Reading: Passage Reading Part – 2
Hello readers, we meet again with another reading material; o’what fun!!!
Anyhow, in my last article, I have discussed regarding how exactly to prepare for various questions during the test. All I expressed regarding the passage was that it is very much important to extract information from the passage. Because the more one extracts information, the better equipped the candidate is going to be to score a higher band score. Today in this article, I am going to exhibit some ways to extract information form the following passage:
THE MAIN PASSAGE
Source: The Guardian
Whatever happened to the “war on terror”? Chris Morris’s intriguing if slight satirical movie, co-written with Jesse Armstrong, imagines the troubled world occupied by those battalions of American bureaucrats, intelligence officers and law-enforcement ninjas, all revved up during the Bush/Obama years to defend the nation against the terrorists of the Middle East and then ideologically orphaned overnight by the wacky new dispensation of Trump – and its preoccupation with Mexico or China or Turkey, or wherever the tweeting finger points next. The film imagines this entire class of people as like the generals perennially fighting the war before the one they’re supposed to be fighting, or like the mythical Japanese soldier in the jungle who doesn’t know the conflict is over. The Day Shall Come sees this group of embittered and disoriented professionals, still doggedly focusing on the threat from Islamic State and Al-Qaida and surreally trying everything to create enemies from this province to give a justification to their own dwindling existence.
Anna Kendrick plays Kendra, an FBI officer in Miami who has been running operations designed to lure jihadi terrorists out into the open and crack terrorist cells. But, under the leadership of her exhausted and cynical boss Andy (an amusingly derisive Denis O’Hare), these schemes have degenerated into simple and bizarre entrapment exercises: idiots and dopes conned into appearing to endorse mass bombings and attacks so they can be ostentatiously arrested to make the whole department look good. As Kendra’s colleague puts it, all this has to be done or “the next thing you know, the Statue of Liberty’s wearing a burqa and we’ve beheaded Bruce Springsteen”. Now they desperately need another plausible bogeyman terrorist cell, and Kendra thinks she’s found one: the eccentric, harmless African-American cult leader Moses (Marchánt Davis) who with his wife Venus (Danielle Brooks, from TV’s Orange Is the New Black) runs a tiny community of souls on a supposed urban farm, all messianically waiting for the day when African Americans will receive justice. And, though Moses strictly believes in non-violence and ecumenism, he is persuaded that he might want to source radioactive materials for a possible cache of ray guns. Kendra realizes that they might be able to promote Moses and his ramshackle outfit as a terrorist nuclear threat. The fakery gets out of control.
It’s an amusing scenario with a likably Ealing-ish flavour: Davis is playing the innocent role that might have been taken by Alec Guinness in an earlier incarnation. However, there’s also a hard edge of cynicism to be found inside Kendra’s department, unsure about how to defend their patch against the city’s police department or against worries about the “optics” of whatever they’re doing. Is it, for example, acceptable to attack African Americans as much as they have traditionally suspected people from the Middle East? As someone excruciatingly puts it: “Brown is down, but black is wack.” Perhaps the chief irony is that Moses’s messianic rhetoric has been fulfilled. The day has indeed come for him, though not in the way he predicted or wanted. It’s a diverting scenario, though maybe it doesn’t quite have the “danger – high voltage” thrill of Morris’s other works. In his 2010 film Four Lions, for example, his dopey terrorists were real terrorists; they really did want to blow themselves and other people up, and Morris brought off the considerable trick of satirizing them while also allowing the audience a kind of sympathetic comic access to their world. With Moses and his crew, the situation is different: they have nothing to be ashamed of and so there is less dramatically at stake in their situation. They have to be seen as innocent and yet strange enough to hold the attention. The effect is uneasy yet interesting and watchable, and Davis and Brooks are always good.
In some ways, we are on firmer comic ground with the fractious and disillusioned world of the FBI surveillance team who know that they are in a professional endgame. There is an air of desperation in everything they say and do – epitomized by the awful moment when Kendra gets a boss a takeaway cup of coffee in an attempt to soften the bad news and he winds up spilling it all over his shirt. “Did you shit your chest?” asks a colleague, contemptuously. They, too, are yearning for the big day to come: a big score against a terrorist villain. But the only reckoning is with their own obsolescence. Since you’re here, we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading and supporting The Guardian’s independent, investigative journalism than ever before. And unlike many news organisations, we have chosen an approach that allows us to keep our journalism accessible to all, regardless of where they live or what they can afford. But we need your ongoing support to keep working as we do.
The Guardian will engage with the most critical issues of our time – from the escalating climate catastrophe to widespread inequality to the influence of big tech on our lives. At a time when factual information is a necessity, we believe that each of us, around the world, deserves access to accurate reporting with integrity at its heart. Our editorial independence means we set our own agenda and voice our own opinions. Guardian journalism is free from commercial and political bias and not influenced by billionaire owners or shareholders. This means we can give a voice to those less heard, explore where others turn away, and rigorously challenge those in power. We need your support to keep delivering quality journalism that’s open and independent. Every reader contribution, big or small, is so valuable.
THE WAY TO EXTRACT INFORMATION FROM THE PASSAGE
As we have to be aware that in IELTS reading part, the main questions are consisted of contents such as fill-in-the-blanks, matching, pictographs and others as such. Here extracting as enough information is very much important for each and every question to be answered. The approach I am about to show is mainly known as the question-answer approach. Let us practice extracting information from above using the same approach;
- What is the first paragraph all about? [Basically it expresses the information regarding a movie written by Chriss Morris and Jesse Armstrong, named The Day Shall Come, and the theme of the movie regarding the embedded massage into it.]
- What kind of “white house analogies” is used in this paragraph? [Basically a comparison between Bush/Obama and Trump administration and how they are relevant to the movie.]
- According to the paragraph – 1, what kind of dilemma has been expressed in the movie regarding the current condition of the war-mongers? [The last sentence of the paragraph]
- What kind of bizarre entrapment did the scheme of Ana Kendrick lead to and who is mainly responsible for that? [Second paragraph, second sentence.]
- Who is supposedly become a scapegoat for the sinister plan of Kendra; what kind of life does the scapegoat lead? [Second paragraph, Fourth and Fifth sentence.]
- Who can be compared with Davis’s character in the movie? [Third Paragraph, first sentence.]
…. And so on!!!
Now here is the deal; this is not my responsibility to get your questions made. All I can do is that show you direction regarding how to ask the right questions so that you may extract more information, which in reality would help the candidate to answer most, if not all of the questions correctly. During the passage reading, there are several things that we must remember such as: time management as well as concentration. Both of them are important as we need to make it all not only withing the correctly allocated time-frame but also as correctly as possible.
That’s all for today. In my next article I am going to express some facts regarding admission essays or statement of purpose. Till then, happy reading!!!!
