Mdm Sng gives tips

Mdm Sng has just finished a game of badminton in school and with adrenaline pumping furiously and the blood rising rapidly to her face and hopefully to her brains, she is now ready to give tips (since Nacrasis asked for tips for improving compre).

Tips for making Mdm Sng happy : play badminton or tennis with her after school. So you think you are very stressed out? And you think I am not? Ever wonder why I love racket games? Because I get to wield a weapon of mass destruction and slam/smash/whack the ball/shuttlecock into my opponent's face/body/unmentionables. It is very cathartic for the soul. A great stress-reliever. And at the end of the game, if my opponent is decimated and humiliated, I feel a deep sense of delirium coursing through my veins. (If I lose the game, it'll just spur me to be more aggressive the next round.)

And now for the boring stuff.

Tips for scoring in comprehension:
1) Read, read, read. And not just a diet of thrillers if that's your favourite. Read newspaper articles, read National Geographic (especially the mountain expeditions, jungle trekking, river crossing stories cos for some strange reasons the O level setters seem to like such topics), read Time/Newsweek/Economist, read the Life section, read the Saturday & Sunday papers. Read for knowledge, read for enjoyment, read to show off to your friends, read so that you can think more clearly. Just read like you need to eat. Fill your mind with ideas, words, be consumed with such profundity and vastness of thoughts that your senses are so titillated and challenged that you are not willing to settle for mere mediocrity and simple-mindedness of thought and paralysing parochialism.

2) When you're truly able to do (1), then the comprehension passage that you encounter is not so daunting any more.

3) Look through past years' papers. Read all the comprehension passages to get a feel of the types of text that are likely to appear in the exams. Go through the questions, there are only so many types of questions they can ask you -- factual, inferential, vocab, irony. If you can understand the passage, then you can handle the questions.

4) Expand your vocabulary. I am still learning new words now. So how can you stop learning or think that what you know now is enough? A paucity of vocabulary actually leads to poverty of thought. You need a good command of language to think more clearly, more vividly and more profoundly.

5) Practise doing summary (since it takes up 50% of the total marks). Learn to extract relevant information and then put them together in continuous prose. Summary skill is actually one of the most useful skills you would need in your life. If you cannot extract information and present them succintly, you will write trashy, long-winded reports and make boring presentations in future when you work. So it is worthwhile investing time to master this skill.

Tips for surviving your O level year:
Work hard, play hard. And help one another. There is strength in numbers. Build up your class spirit and then you'll find studying quite fun. Believe me! Mdm Sng doesn't lie (although sometimes she tells white lies - which I hope you know what it means because some of you did not understand the phrase and wrote out of point in your test! - but she has very pure intentions!).

*Bonus* Tips for 4D:
6250. Which is the percentage of distinctions that your predecessors scored for EL last year. 62.5% ah! How, scary target to beat right?

My adrenaline's dropping now, so it's a sign to go home. Talk to you in class tomorrow.