Academic/General Training Module by Adam Smith First Published in 2015

A some 
example 
of 
obesity 
B 
a definition of obesity 
C 
the different types of obesity 
D 
the treatment of obesity 
As you may have noticed, both questions can be answered without knowing the 
meaning of the underlined words. It is not even necessary to understand the meaning 
of the word obesity. 
 
 

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 IELTS
 JOURNAL 
 
36 
Guessing is a useful strategy 
Read the sentence below from a passage about computer crimes. 
Computers have been used for mist kinds of crimes, including fraud, theft, 
larceny, embezzlement, burglary, sabotage, espionage, murder and forgery, 
since the first cases were reported in 1958. 
You come to the word ‘fraud’ and realize that you don’t know this word. You 
immediately move on to the next word and see that this word is also unfamiliar. You 
may stay calm and move on again. There are many words that you don’t know but you 
still move on. Later, you find two of these two things: 
There are no questions relating to this sentence. Therefore, you don’t need to 
understand this sentence to answer the questions. 
There is a question relating to this sentence. So, you go back to the sentence 
and focus on the word you know. For example, imagine you all the following 
words in the sentence: 
Computers have been used for mist kinds of crimes, including ----, ----, ----, ----, --
--, ----, ----, murder and ----, since the first cases were reported in 1958. 
You can see that the sentence is presenting examples of kinds of computer crime. By 
using your general knowledge and paying attention to the general idea of the 
sentence, you can guess that the unknown words are types of crime such as stealing 
money or stealing information. That is enough for you to be able to answer the 
question.