介绍:
Hello everyone. It’s my pleasure to share some of my personal experience and exam skills in CET-4 with you today. And before we go into details, first I wanna say something about how to take this exam properly. Whenever it refers to exams, especially English exams, many of us may consider ourselves as brave warriors who are fighting a losing battle, so helpless and so desperate.We have no choice but to march on. That’s quite understandable because English isn’t our first language. It’s natural for us to have this kind of pre-exam nerves and panic. So first of all, no matter you’re a good English learner or not, don’t be nervous and just take it easy. You know that a good beginning is half of success. So keeping in a good mood is very important. And please remember that the result of it not only shows your ability but also how much you’ve devoted to it, how well you’ve prepared for it. Besides practice and accumulation, skills and other elements involved, like some unexpected conditions, may also affect your final grades. But basically it partly depends on your accumulation and attitude. As an old saying goes: Rome was not built in one day. So if you are not good at English and have a very limited vocabulary, you may set an achievable goal, like 480. Stick to it, and then make preparations accordingly. Thus you won’t feel so stressful and can be motivated more easily because you can see your improvement soon. To summarize, whatever category of English levels you fall in, set a proper goal and take it easy.
For listening skills, it’s really hard for me to explain all those skills in just a few minutes. So here I will put emphasis on news report. We know that news in CET-4 are usually broadcasted in a comparatively fast speed and this makes many of us confused when comprehend the news. So first and foremost, please remember that it’s unnecessary to understand exactly what every word means. What we should do in news listening is to keep pace with the flow of idea and grasp the main idea of it. The structure of a piece of news is just like an inverted pyramid that the most significant information would be given first. Or we could say that the topic of the news usually shall be given in the first sentence. For example, if you hear words like “killing”, “attack” you may anticipate that this piece of news is going to talk about an accident related to terrorism . With this kind of awareness and prediction, we change our roles from “passive listeners” to “active listeners”. In news, we should firstly scan the choices and mark those proper nouns , like countries, names and so on. Numbers like date and data should also be given enough attention. Then we should try to grasp the main idea of the news by asking ourselves: what’s the topic of the news? Bearing these two tips in mind, it would be easier for you to understand it.
Words selection tests on logical analysis and grammatical knowledge. Don’t be panic when encountering unknown words. Those blanks we need to fill in, seen from lexical perspective, can be analyzed by grammatical rules. Should it be an adjective or a noun? Should it be in singular form or plural form? Should it be past tense or present tense? And seen from syntactic perspective, through the linking verbs and context of the passage, we may compare those words to find the most appropriate one. We always tend to exaggerate the difficulty of a certain problem. However, if we avoid to face it bravely, we shall never make any progress. So again, try your best and try to appreciate English. It’s not only a tool used for communication, but also a beautiful language to express the splendid world in a unique way.
Finally is the reading part. Since time is limited, we may just focus on paragraph matching. In this part, the selected passage is usually very long and filled with unknown words. So here my suggestion is to go through the provided choices first and circle those key words. We may call it a first impression. It may save your time later. Still, here key words refer to those proper nouns, or words related to the topic. For reading, we may resort to our background information to help us understand it better. Passages in CET-4 are usually about social issues like environment, the advance of technology, climate change and so on. Beyond the literal meaning, we should transfer our thinking pattern into western one: that is logic and reasoning. All the questions are centered around the main idea of the passage. If you want to prove an opinion, you should go back to original passage and find the supporting lines; otherwise, the statement is wrong. Anyhow, it may still sounds too abstract, so just practice more and have some cultural awareness in mind.
