Paraphrasing the Task Language

Welcome back this is going to be the last lecture in section 5. All about vocabulary and having looked at specific language for each of the different question types in this lecture. We’re going to look at paraphrasing in general the task of language so avoiding the repetition of TASC language categories and units of measurements much are common in task one. So let’s think about categories first of all categories. Interesting questions are very very variable. So this section will cover just a couple of the most common category themes but I want to stress right now that that this selection of categories is limited. It’s only going to be for it’s countries and nationalities activities foods and transport. So I’m going to stress right now that if you would like me to cover another category and if you’d like to ask for ways to paraphrase those particular categories do get in touch on the Q and A section and I will try to develop this lecture in the future or perhaps out of PTF documents. But for now we’re just going to focus on these four category themes and how we can paraphrase common expressions. So let’s begin by looking at countries and nationalities very very simply. We’re going to go through one example and look at how we can paraphrase it. So the example here is Spain. Imagine we’re looking at the category of Spain let’s say the graphics people in Spain versus people in another country. How many apples that they buy per year. So we could say Spain. So we could say Spain buys on average 12 hundred apples. Or you could use the Spanish we could start looking at it in terms of people that Spanish. We could also use Spanish citizens Spanish government Spanish workers are using an adjective and also using a noun next to it. We could say citizens of Spain. So we could use a noun phrase. They’re just flipping around the order. Finally we could use Spaniards Germans Italians Thais things like this so we can use any of those forms. You shouldn’t have to repeat the same expressions over and over. What about activities. Well look an example of a particular activity. Chatting online. So of course we could say chatting online use the same form but we might be able to flip the words around and say online chat. This works here. It might not work in all examples. For example you would say playing football you wouldn’t say football play because play in this case would not collocate with football in that way. So be careful here. But here we can say online chats we could say chatting on the internet. Think about how you could paraphrase online paraphrase to on internet. You can say chatting via social media. That’s usually what we do when we chat online and messaging online chatting messaging. Think about changing the verb was another form of the verb that we could use. That doesn’t change the meaning but just offers a bit of variety. Let’s look at a couple more. First of all looking at foods we’re going to look here. Chicken consumption chicken consumption of course. As always we can use chicken consumption. That’s where we’re going to start. How else could we paraphrase this we could say the consumption of chicken so we’re swapping the words around to nouns around so instead of a compound noun we’ve now got a noun phrase the noun. Now we could say the amount of chicken consumed. Maybe that looks a little bit similar to the introductions that we looked at earlier in this course and that’s because it is similar. They can help us those introductions can help us here. We could say consumption levels for chicken and we could say the quantity of chicken eaten too was being changed a quantity instead of amount we’re saying quantity instead of consumed we’re saying eaten. So of course we could also say the quantity of chicken consumed and the amount of chicken eaten also. OK. OK so plenty of options here. And he may be able to do this for things which are not related to food baby items. Imagine mobile phones or mobile phone purchases the purchases of mobile phones the number of mobile phones purchased purchase numbers for mobile phones the quantity of mobile phones purchased is not just food that could come into any kind of item. Most of the time I find this like a transport example we’re going to look at is traveling by train and of course by train is what we’re going to start with. How else could we say about the number of people who travel by train. We could say the number of people who use train as a mode of transport a huge train take the train as a motor transport etc.. We can say by rail in this case train we can paraphrase to rail we’re not changing the other words we’re just changing train here to rail. We could say via train. So instead of changing the way we train we change the work by to Wajir. And we could say take the train as well. So these are just four categories that we’ve looked at here. As I mentioned earlier do get in touch if you want to if you would like me to explore some more. For now we’re going to look at paraphrasing time. We’re paraphrasing times now let’s have a look at this this chart again here this graph with a trend. And let’s have a look at this example. After 2006 the number of basketball students plummeted to just 20 another way of saying here’s between 2006 and 2007 the number of basketball students plummeted to just 20. So instead of saying after you’re using between an and you could also say by 2008 the number of basketball students has plummeted to just 20. He were using by but notice them when we use by we need to use the past perfect. So we have had plummeted in a two year period from 2006 to 2008. The number of basketball students plummeted to just 20. Again another form of paraphrasing we can use a noun like period in a two year period and pre 2006 basketball numbers ranged from 56 to 61. But post 2006 the number of possible students plummeted to just 20. Again the same information is being conveyed here. But we’re using pre and post to talk about before and after a particular time. So five different ways of saying the same thing. Finally let’s have a look at paraphrasing units of measurement. Now there are a number of ways that we can paraphrase units of measurement regardless of what those units are. So let’s have a look at a common unit of measurement comes up quite a lot numbers of people. Here’s the first example in 2012 sixty four thousand people visited Sweden. Wow. Twenty five thousand people visited. No way. How can we say that in another way. Well we can use the word people again. So in 2012 64000 people visited Sweden while the figure for Norway was 25000. OK so instead of using this 25000 people visited Norway we can say the figure for Norway was 25000. And there are lots of ways that we can paraphrase this in a very similar format. Same here. Sixty four thousand people visited Sweden while the count for Norway was 25000. While the number for Norway was 25000 while the data for Norway was 25000. While 25000 was the figure for Norway. And notice you can repeat this final structure with the above words while twenty five thousand was the number for Norway where 25000 was the count for Norway will 25000 was the data from Norway. OK so lots of different ways of paraphrasing here. So this is just looking at numbers of people. But this language is so flexible that we can use it for pretty much any unit of measurement. So let’s have a look at a different one. Sixty four thousand tons were transported by rail. While the figure for air was 25000. When we say air we’re talking about going by plane tons of whatever it is it doesn’t really matter. Could be tons of apples tons of oil tons of gold. Who knows. Sixty four thousand tons were transported by rebels bigger for the count the air the number for the day to fill air 25000 was the figure for all of these also work. It’s a very flexible way of paraphrasing language. Hopefully that gives you a little bit more flexibility with the language. Go ahead and try and use this paraphrasing technique in your next response. And if you have any questions about it. As always you do get in touch. And if you’d like me to cover any more topics or categories in a future lecture. As always as I mentioned earlier do get in touch with the Q and A function and I’d be happy to hear from you. So that wraps up Section 5 in the next lecture. We’re going to be moving on to Section 6 which is all about the bad descriptor category grammatical range and accuracy. So we’ll see that.