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Easiest to Hardest

In this lesson, we’re going to take a look at a simple strategy for Filling in Tables. When you’re filling in a table, you want to go from easy to hard. What I mean is, you should start by answering the parts of the table which you’re confident in.

Then, if you’re unsure of some answers, do those last. By answering the easy questions first, you save time for yourself. This is especially helpful for two common tables. Matching and ordering. A matching table looks like this. Well, this is clear that if you can choose that C goes in space two, then it’s easier to choose A or B in these spaces.

Well, maybe that’s obvious. But, my point is this. Don’t get stuck looking at choice A for a long time, if you can’t understand A. Look through the three sentences or facts and find the easiest to read. Start there. Use something you can definitely understand first.

Don’t get stuck on the long complicated sentence with a lot of vocabulary you don’t know. You can come back to that after. Okay. And for ordering tables, we do basically the same thing. Only it’s a little bit different because for an ordering table, we are going from earliest to latest.

And that means, that maybe B is very early. But, actually, D is earlier. So, we might have to do some rearranging, some moving, if we choose something that’s not right the first time. That’s okay, that is still faster than getting stuck trying to understand something which is long and complicated.

First, go through the answer choices. Don’t look for the earliest, look for the easiest. Put the easiest in the table, and then move it if you need to, after you choose the others. The whole point here is to save time. Get the points you can.

If you can understand it, then you might get points. If you’re having trouble understanding it, then it’s not so good to spend a long time doing that. Because you might waste time that you can use for other easy questions later. Let’s try this with a sample question.

The lecture we’re using is from the previous video called Listening Sample Three, Classroom Discussion. So go back and listen. If you’ve already heard it before, then you can just continue watching. Okay. Here is our question. Indicate whether each of the following statements is true of sestinas according to the lecture.

This indicate whether each is true, is definitely gonna to be a yes, no table. So, let’s see it. All right. The first thing I should do, look at the easiest one. Look at this nice short sentence. I only need to know this word structure.

I definitely know that. And this word, complex. Well, if you’re not clear about the meaning of complex, you could remember the word complicated, which has the same basic meaning and looks very similar. The structure of a sestina is complex. We saw that structure, and it was definitely complicated.

You should answer this almost immediately. This should be very fast. It is the easiest of the four. Now, we can spend more time on the others. Let’s go to the next one. The oldest sestinas are less repetitive than modern ones.

Okay. Well, if we can understand this sentence, it’s pretty clear. The oldest sestinas are less repetitive, than modern ones. Are old sestinas repetitive, and are modern sestinas repetitive. We actually didn’t really hear that in the lecture. I don’t remember hearing anything about comparing old sestinas to modern sestinas.

We did talk about repetition, but this comparison did not happen. Because we don’t have a less than relationship in the lecture, we’ll choose no. All right. What’s next? How about this one, it’s pretty short.

Most sestinas are written in Spanish or related languages. Okay. We did hear something about Spanish and we heard something about a related language called Oxytanian. But, do we know that about most sestinas? Hm, I don’t think so, so I’ll choose no.

Now, this is actually a relatively easy to understand sentence. It’s longer than the sentence below, which we chose first. But, it’s about the same in simplicity. You won’t always know that. It’s easiest to just start from the shortest sentence. If that short sentence has some very difficult vocabulary and it’s not clear, then move on to another short sentence.

All right. And how about this one. The author must be careful to end lines with especially common words. And once again, the vocabulary here actually isn’t too bad. But, imagine that it was. Imagine that you had a hard time understanding this sentence.

Now, if you had trouble with it, you might already have three correct answers here. And that would give you one point. That is, one point of one question in your raw score, not your scaled score. This could be incorrect, and you would still get the easy point. Now, if we actually do want to answer this question, let’s think about careful to end lines with especially common words.

The professor does say that if you chose a rare word like elbow, it will be difficult to write the poem. But he also said, if you choose common words like me, then it will be a boring poem. So, we don’t want that. This is another no.

All right. And that’s it for filling in table questions.