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

 IELTS
 JOURNAL 
 
7 
“Tea plants are grown on tea plantations, called gardens or estates, in areas that 
have a great amount of rainfall and rich loamy soil.” 
It is enough to understand that tea plants are grown on/in somewhere/somehow. If 
you later find a question that relates to this sentence, you can come back and read it 
more intensively. 
Mapping: Pin Dropping 
Every passage you see in the IELTS academic reading test may seem completely 
strange to you. It is easy to get lost inside all the words you face in a passage. What 
you need is a map which will help you orientate. Every paragraph in a passage has its 
own main idea, which is different from all other paragraphs. On the margins near each 
paragraph, write briefly what its main idea is. You can also underline the main idea or 
the words in the paragraph which explain its main idea. This process is called mapping 
or pin dropping. You can create a map while finding.
You can now practice finding main ideas and mapping. Make sure you find the main 
ideas in the passage below as quickly as possible within the time limit. 
 
 

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 IELTS
 JOURNAL 
 
8 
Exercise 1: Finding main ideas 
Read the following passage as quickly as possible and underline the sentence that gives 
the main idea (the topic sentence) of each paragraph. Time limit: 1 minute 
Libraries 
Libraries are quite difficult to define. If you ask most people to define a library, they 
will probably say that it is a building with a lot of books. Strictly speaking, a library does 
not have to be a building: it can be a room, or indeed any area where material is kept. 
Equally, a library is not merely a collection of books: there are journals, newspapers, 
CD-ROMs, microfilm, audio-visual materials and so on. So, to be more accurate we can 
say that a library is a collection of information and material. 
Libraries are organized in three ways. Most libraries will use one or more of the three 
main classification systems that have been developed to detail the material in the 
collection. They referred to as the Dewey Decimal System, the Universal Decimal 
Classification and the Library of Congress System. 
Nowadays libraries are under threat for a number of reasons. The primary challenge, 
as never before, is funding. Hardware and personnel costs increase each time 
technology expands. Equally there are challenges in the skills needed by users and 
resource professionals. 
It is difficult to predict the future of libraries. Our basic concept of libraries will almost 
certainly, it would appear, change dramatically in that we will not think of them (and 
access them) as physical places, which is the prevailing concept at the moment. But 
beyond that, it is difficult to predict both usage patterns and preferred systems of data 
recording and retrieval.