Question 1 Skills: How to Summarise

Question 1(f): The summary section of Paper 1 in your IGCSE exam assesses your ability to understand both explicit and implicit information in a text and to summarise this information in your own words.

The following sections will explain what summarising involves and provide guidance on how to summarise information effectively.

 

What is Summarising?

Summarising is a vital literacy skill, not only for your IGCSE English Language exam but also for many other areas of study. When you summarise, you are expressing the key facts or ideas from a text in a shortened form, using your own words. A summary should clearly and concisely explain all the important information in a text, focusing only on the relevant details and omitting less important ones.

 

The key elements of a summary are:

• Objectivity: A summary should stick to the facts and remain impartial.
• Concision: A summary should focus on the essential information, leaving out unnecessary details.
• Structure: A summary should be well-organised, preferably in chronological order, to ensure clarity.
• Accuracy: The information in the summary must be correct and reliable.

 

For Question 1(f) in your exam, your summary should clearly and accurately convey the required information. This means distinguishing between important and irrelevant details in the text. While summarising generally allows you to repeat parts of the text verbatim, for this exam task, you are expected to write in your own words as much as possible. This task combines both summarising and paraphrasing, which involves rearranging and rephrasing the text into your own words.

 

How to Summarise in the Exam

To complete this task effectively in the exam, it is crucial to fully understand what you are being asked to summarise. Let’s look at an example from Question 1(f) of the June 2020 exam paper to illustrate this:

 

Exam question	What you need to do
According to Text B, what made Lyuba such a remarkable and precious scientific specimen and what did scientists hope to discover by studying her?	Here, there are two things you are being asked to summarise: What made Lyuba such a remarkable and precious specimen What scientists hoped to discover by studying her

 

Once you have broken down the question, you can go back to the text and find the relevant information for these two points. Organising the text logically will help you structure your summary. Let’s see how to do this with the first three paragraphs of the text:

 

Text

Important information (relevant to the focus of the question)

Only a handful of mammoths have ever been found before, but none like her. Her name is Lyuba. A one-month-old baby mammoth, she roamed the tundra around 40,000 years ago, before dying mysteriously. Discovered on a riverbank in Siberia, she is the most perfectly preserved woolly mammoth ever found. Lyuba has captivated the scientific world, creating headlines globally. “Waking the Baby Mammoth,” a new television programme, tells the story of this single, accidental discovery of a frozen baby mammoth in the Siberian tundra and how the find has deepened our understanding of these extinct animals. The programme begins with the fortunate discovery of Lyuba by a reindeer herder who was concerned that disturbing the remains might bring a curse. Often, when similar finds are made, the preserved creatures are dug up and sold, causing irreversible damage and the loss of valuable information. However, the herder wisely contacted authorities, allowing scientists to retrieve her carefully. Everyone wanted to know how Lyuba had died. What could she reveal about life during the Ice Age and the Earth’s changing climate?

What made Lyuba such a remarkable and precious scientific specimen: Only a small number of mammoths have ever been discovered. She is the best-preserved woolly mammoth ever found. Her discovery was accidental. The man who found her refrained from disturbing her remains or attempting to sell them. Scientists were able to carefully recover her without causing any damage.   What scientists hope to discover by studying her: A deeper understanding of these extinct creatures.  The cause of her death. Insights into life during the Ice Age. Information about climate change.

 

Summarising in continuous form

 Typically, when summarising from a text, you can select the most suitable format to present your information, such as bullet points. However, in the exam, you are required to use continuous writing and your own words. This means you must organise your answer into clear paragraphs while still including all the key information mentioned above.

 

A good way to begin is by using the phrasing of the question. For example:

 

You should begin with the first point from the text but think about how to rephrase it to express it in your own words. For instance:

 

It is also helpful to use connectives effectively to link your points, ensuring your answer flows smoothly and maintains overall coherence. For instance: