In addition, a program modelled on an earlier project called "Take Charge" was implemented. Essentially, Take Charge provides an effective feedback loop from both customers and employees. Customers' comments, both positive and negative, are recorded by staff. These are collated regularly to identify opportunities for improvement. Just as importantly, employees are requested to note down their own suggestions for improvement. (AHI has set an expectation that employees will submit at least three suggestions for every one they receive from a customer.) Employee feedback is reviewed daily and suggestions are implemented within 48 hours, if possible, or a valid reason is given for non-implementation. If suggestions require analysis or data collection, the Take Charge team has 30 days in which to address the issue and come up with recommendations.
Although quantitative evidence of AHI's initiatives at SAH are limited at present, anecdotal evidence clearly suggests that these practices are working. Indeed AHI is progressively rolling out these initiatives in other hotels in Australia, whilst numerous overseas visitors have come to see how the program works.
EXERCISE 1
Choose the appropriate letters A-D according to the above reading passage.
1. The high costs of running AHI's hotels are related to their
A. management.
B. size.
C. staff.
D. polices.
2. SAH's new organizational structure requires
A. 75% of the old management positions.
B. 25% of the old management positions.
C. 25% more management positions.
D. 5% fewer management positions.
3. The SAH's approach to organizational structure required changing practices in
A. industrial relations.
B. firing staff.
C. hiring staff.
D. marketing.
4. The total number of jobs advertised at the SAH was.
A. 70
B. 120
C. 170
D. 280
5. Categories A, B and C were used to select.
A. front offices staff
B. new teams
C. department heads
D. new managers
EXERCISE 2
Complete the following summary of the last four paragraphs of the above reading passage using ONE OR TWOwords from the reading passage for each answer.
What They Did at SAH
Teams of employees were selected from different hotel departments to participate in a 6 exercise.
The information collected was used to compare7processes which, in turn, led to the development of 8 that would be used to increase the hotel's capacity to improve 9 as well as quality.
Also, an older program known as 10 was introduced at SAH. In this program, 11 is sought from customers and staffs. Whenever possible 12 suggestions are implemented within 48 hours. Other suggestions are investigated for their feasibility for a period of up to 13.
Again, there is little need for reasoning on behalf of the test taker. The main task is to seek and find a specific word from the reading passage. So how can one do so? The easiest and fastest way is to rely on a few of our golden rules. Primarily, we check for hotspots in the question, things like dates, numbers, or symbols. Unfortunately, here there are no such hotspots. We then rely on the information we gained from our reading techniques. After scanning for hotspots, none of which seem obvious in this question, we think of the topics we encountered when reading the first and last sentences of each paragraph. Here, too, this is not apparent in the question. Thus we begin to look at examples presented in the reading passage, still keeping our eyes out for hotspots. We know from the test question that we are looking for a particular "exercise". We can thus immediately rule out the paragraphs with a lot of figures and data. We are
looking for something more descriptive of a single project.
Two things stand out and attract our attention. There are two words, "Take Charge" and "benchmarking", that are in quotation marks. One of the words is even capitalized. This should draw our attention. Since reading the first and last sentences of each paragraph still has not allowed us to locate this specific information, we begin to read examples. We start with these two paragraphs for they are most conspicuous.
We read that one method for labor cost reduction given in the text is "benchmarking". Although we do not necessarily know what "benchmarking" means, we know from our "context is key" principle that we do not have to. Looking at these two examples, whose whereabouts we noted through two hotspots—quotation marks and capital letters—we see that the "benchmarking" process used teams "made up of employees from different departments within the hotel". This is all the information we need to know. The answer is right there in front of us. The answer to Question #6 must be "benchmarking".
So, as we have stated, this section is not difficult at all. Using certain of our principles we can track down the right answer and move on.
B. Multiple-Choice
The multiple-choice section of the IELTS test is the same as any other multiple-choice test. There are three types of multiple-choice questions seen in the IELTS test. In the first, you will be asked a question and given four or five potential answers to choose from. The second will provide a list of seven possible answers and you will be asked to choose two. This section is relatively straightforward and simple. Still, there are certain tricks particular to the IELTS examination that we should keep in mind.
Primarily, the multiple-choice section is one of the few sections of the IELTS test that will ask you to use your reason to answer questions. This is one of a few examples where the answers may not all be in front of you. You may be asked to do more than simply repeat information provided in the text. You may instead be asked about the main idea of a section of the passage. Obviously, our hotspots will not help us find this main idea. We should state clearly, however, that more than ninety percent of the time the multiple-choice questions deal with information written explicitly in the text. Thus, you can rely on our first principle—the answer is right in front of you—for the large majority of questions.
Occasionally, the question will not be so specific.
Do the following exercise and we'll see how it works:
PRACTICE READING PASSAGE TWO
The Pursuit of Happiness
New research uncovers some anti-intuitive insights into how many people are happy—and why.
Compared with misery, happiness is relatively unexplored terrain for social scientists. Between 1967 and 1994, 46,380 articles indexed in Psychological Abstracts mentioned depression, 36,851 anxiety, and 5,099 anger. Only 2,389 spoke of happiness, 2,340 life satisfaction, and 405 joy.
Recently we and other researchers have begun a systematic study of happiness. During the past two decades, dozens of investigators throughout the world have asked several hundred thousand representatively sampled people to reflect on their happiness and satisfaction with life—or what psychologists call "subjective well-being". In the US, the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago has surveyed a representative sample of roughly 1,500 people a year since 1957 and the institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan has carried out similar studies on a less regular basis, as has the Gallup Organization. Government-funded efforts have also probed the moods of European countries.
We have uncovered some surprising findings. People are happier than one might expect, and happiness does not appear to depend significantly on external circumstances. Although viewing life as a tragedy has a long and honorable history, the responses of random samples of people around the world about their happiness paints a much rosier picture. In the University of Chicago surveys, three in 10 Americans say they are very happy, for example. Only one in 10 chooses the most negative description "not too happy". The majority describe themselves as "pretty happy"...
How can social scientists measure something as hard to pin down as happiness?
Most researchers simply ask people to report their feelings of happiness or unhappiness and to assess how satisfying their lives are. Such self-reported well-being is moderately consistent over years of re-testing. Furthermore, those who say they are happy and satisfied seem happy to their close friends and family members and to a psychologist-interviewer. Their daily mood ratings reveal more positive emotions, and they smile more than those who call themselves unhappy. Self-reported happiness also predicts other indicators of well being. Compared with the depressed, happy people are less self-focused, less hostile and abusive and less susceptible to disease.
We have found that the even distribution of happiness cuts across almost all demographic classifications of age, economic class, race and educational level. In addition, almost all strategies for assessing subjective well being—including those that sample people's experience by polling them at random times with beepers—turn up similar findings.
Interviews with representative samples of people of all ages, for example, reveal that no time of life is notably happier or unhappier. Similarly, men and women are equally likely to declare themselves "very happy" and "satisfied" with life, according to a statistical digest of 146 studies by Marilyn J. Haring, William Stock and Morris A. Okun, all then at Arizona State University. Wealth is also a poor predictor of happiness. People have not become happier over time as their cultures have become more affluent. Even though Americans earn twice as much in today's dollars as they did in 1957, the proportion of those telling surveyors from the National Opinion Research Center that they are "very happy" has declined from 35 to 29 percent. Even very rich people—those surveyed among Forbes magazine's 100 wealthiest Americans—are only slightly happier than the average American. Those whose income has increased over a 10-year period are not happier than those whose income is stagnant. Indeed, in most nations the correlation between income and happiness is negligible—only in the poorest countries, such as Bangladesh and India, is income a good measure of emotional well being.
Are people in rich countries happier, by and large, than people in not so rich countries? It appears in general that they are, but the margin may be slim. In Portugal, for example, only one in 10 people reports being very happy, whereas in the much more prosperous Netherlands the proportion of very happy is four in 10. Yet there are curious reversals in this correlation between national wealth and well being—the Irish during the 1980s consistently reported greater life satisfaction than the wealthier West Germans. Furthermore, other factors, such as civil rights, literacy and duration of democratic government, all of which also promote reported life satisfaction, tend to go hand in hand with national wealth. As a result, it is impossible to tell whether the happiness of people in wealthier nations is based on money or is a by-product of other felicities.
Although happiness is not easy to predict from material circumstances, it seems consistent for those who have it. In one National Institute on Aging study of 5,000 adults, the happiest people in 1973 were still relatively happy a decade later, despite changes in work, residence and family status.
Questions 1-3
Choose the appropriate letters A-D and write them in boxes 1-3 on your answer sheet.
1. What point are the writers making in the opening paragraph?
A. Happiness levels have risen since 1967.
B. Journals take a biased view on happiness.
C. Happiness is not a well-documented research area.
D. People tend to think about themselves negatively.
2. What do the writers say about their research findings?
A. They had predicted the results correctly.
B. They felt people had responded dishonesty.
C. They conflict with those of other researchers.
D. Happiness levels are higher than they had believed.
3. In the fourth paragraph, what does the reader learn about the research method used?
A. It is new.
B. It appears to be reliable.
C. It is better than using beepers.
D. It reveals additional information.
In Question #1 of Practice Reading Passage Two, for example, we are asked the following:
"What point are the writers making in the opening paragraph？ "For our purposes now, it is not that important to look at the specific passage. What is important to note is the slightly different way this question is phrased. We are being asked to make a judgment based on our understanding of the first paragraph of the passage. We are not being asked about a specific detail, as we normally are. What is the best way to deal with a question like this?
Since all such questions will refer to a specific part of the article (we are asked about the "opening paragraph" here, although typically we are asked questions concerning the latter half of the article) it is best to go back and re-read this section. Before answering the question or looking at the possible answers, take a few seconds to read the first and last sentences of the paragraph again. Based upon these two sentences, summarize the passage to yourself using your own words. By doing so you will understand more clearly the main idea of the paragraph.
In this example we read:
"Compared with misery, happiness is relatively unexplored terrain for social scientists. Between 1967 and 1994, 46,380 articles indexed in Psychological Abstracts mentioned depression, 36,851 anxiety, and 5,099 anger. Only 2,389 spoke of happiness, 2,340 life satisfaction, and 405 joy."
Here, since the paragraph is so short, we will summarize the whole passage, not just the first and last sentences. How should we summarize this paragraph? A suitable summary would be, "Unlike misery or other emotions, happiness is not researched that often." We then take a look at our answer choices:
A Happiness levels have risen since 1967.
B Journals take a biased view on happiness.
C Happiness is not a well-documented research area.
D People tend to think about themselves negatively.
Answers A and D are not even mentioned in this paragraph so we immediately rule them out as possible answers. Is the answer then B or C? The answer most similar to the summary we came up with is C. B is indeed true. But is B the main point? No, it isn't.
So our summary approach has taught us an important lesson: do not mistake examples or proof for the main idea as the main idea itself. This quick, one-sentence summary method is the ideal way to deal with these questions about the main point of a specific paragraph.
