How to Study For Exams

Taking exams is stressful, but you can make it easier by improving the way you study. Studying for your exams will keep you from feeling unprepared, and it will set you up for success!

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This is easier said than done, but learning how to take good notes will help you once it comes time to study. Write down everything your teacher writes on the board or puts up on the screens. Try to record as much of what the teacher says as possible.

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Studying in a dark room is not recommended (推荐). Add lights at night, or in the daytime, open the window coverings (open the window a little, too). People tend to study and focus better in a brighter room with little noise.

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Think of your teacher: What is my teacher most likely to ask on the exam? What materials did the teacher once emphasize (强调) before exams? This may help you review the most important information for the exams.

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If you don’t know the answer to the question, do the next one and come back to it at the end. Struggling and concentrating on a question you don’t know the answer to can be time consuming (消耗), which makes you lose marks.

How can we think in English? I think the best way is to practice as what a football player does every day. During the practice, the football players pass the ball to his teammates over and over again, so they won’t have to think about passing the ball in the game, they will just do it. You can train yourself to think in English in this way. The first step is to think of the words that you use daily, simple everyday words like book, shoe or tree. For example, whenever you see a “book”, you should think of it in English, instead of in your language. After you have learned to think of words in English, you’d better go on to the next step — thinking of sentences in English.

Listening is very useful way to learn English. Listen first and don’t care too much about whether you fully understand what you’re hearing. Try to say what you hear as much as possible. The more you listen, the better you learn. After you reach a higher level, start having conversations with yourself in English. This will lead you to think in English.

There are about fifteen hundred languages in the world. But only a few of them are very important. English is one of them. Many, many people use it, not only in England and the USA, but also in other parts of the world.

About 200,000,000 people speak it as their own language. It is difficult to say how many people are learning it as a foreign language. Many millions of people are trying to do so. Is it easy or difficult to learn English? Different people may have different answers. Have you ever noticed ads(广告) of this kind in the newspapers or magazines? “Learn English in six weeks, or give your money back…” “Easy and funny…” “Our records and tapes help you master English in a month”. Of course, it never happens quite like that.

The only language that seems easy to learn is the mother tongue. We should remember that we all learned our own language well when we were children. If we could learn English in the same way, it would not seem so difficult. Think of what a small child does. He listens to what people say. He tries what he hears.

So it is hard to say that learning English is easy. We must do a lot of practice. And practice needs great efforts and takes much time. Good teachers, record, tapes, books, and dictionaries will be helpful, but they cannot do the student’s work for him.