I am developing a worksheet for a B1 level (CEFR) student who is undertaking the IELTS General exam. The section I am focusing on is the 'Matching Features' Questions of the reading portion of the exam. Please use the following transcript for inspiration:

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Let's take a look at matching features questions. For this lesson, we are going to use the Lowell article. We've used that one for a few other lessons already, and there's a link for you below, to go find that article. Okay. So this is what a matching features question will look like.

You've got a list of things. In this case, we have a list of people. They will all belong to the same category, whatever it is. Your job then is to take the statements over here and match them with the person who relates to them according to the article. Okay?

So each question will match with a different person in the box. So this type of question tests your ability to find factual information. This is more about finding detailed information most of the time. Although sometimes they will ask you to find theories and opinions. So for example, they may have a list of people in the box and an article about, some topic where different people have different theories or opinions about it.

Your job in that case will be to match the the people with the theory, that they hold. It could be reversed as well. In the box, you may have a list of theories and, your questions will be people and you need to relate those theories to the people. Okay. That's how these kinds of questions are generally structured for your IELTS exam.

The answers do not come in order for this type of question. Okay? So the answer to number 1 could come at the end of the article and the answer for number 2 might come at the beginning. Usually, your answers will be letters. Okay.

So a, b, c, d. Although you should definitely check the directions every time. Sometimes they can change things. So the best approach to this question starts with just noting the category that you need to find. Okay.

So for our, sample the category that you need to find. Okay? So for our, sample question, we're supposed to look for people, but they could be other things. Types of something. Right?

Types of birds, types of cars, types of food. All the things in the box will relate to the same category in some way. As we mentioned already, they could be theories, opinions. Okay. Many different types of things are possible.

It depends on the article you're reading what they will put in the box. You need to be careful with these kinds of questions. Sometimes an item in the box will come up in more than one paragraph. In that case, when you would search for an answer about Lowell, you may need to scan much of the article because he's mentioned so many times. That will be part of the strategy we discuss, in a moment when we look at our sample question.

Okay. So if the first part is is taking careful note of the category you're looking for, the second part of your approach to this question is to note the keywords in the questions. Okay. So let's take a look at how that works. How would we approach, one of these matching features questions?

Okay. So we come to this question on the exam. I'm assuming that you have already gone through and skimmed the Lowell article. Remember our SUN method where you skim, underline, and take notes. I'm assuming that you've already looked through and you've tried to figure out the organization of this passage and what the main ideas might be.

Maybe you've underlined a few things, to remember, but you at least have a sense of where things basically might be in the passage. Okay. So your first step, as we mentioned on the last screen there, you want to just take note of your categories. What are you looking for? And as we already know, we're looking for people.

Now what strategy would you use in order to decide who you should look for 1st? Now that it's time to go back and scan for answers, would it be smarter to start with some people in this list over others as you begin your search? I would advise starting with someone or something in that list that you remember from skimming that is not mentioned very often in the passage. I would not for example start scanning for answers related to Lowell because Lowell is mentioned many times in the article and I might waste a lot of time trying to find some answer about Lowell when you know if you look we only have 4 questions here and it's possible that Lowell is not even the correct answer for any of these questions. That would be a huge waste of time.

I would choose something in the box that I remember only seeing a couple of once or twice maybe or not very often at least in the article. Is there somebody like that that you remember from skimming the Lowell article? Well, for me, I would probably start looking for answers related to Mike Brown. I remember seeing his name. I believe I only saw it one time and as I'm going back to scan for answers, I think I can remember exactly where to find his name in the passage.

So that would be a great place to start your scanning as you're approaching this question. Okay. But the second thing you need to do, you can't just go back and scan and look for Mike Brown. You need to know what you're looking for. So it's good to go through and just underline keywords in your questions.

Take a minute, take a little more if you need it, but to go back through and identify what are you looking for as you go back to scan. For you can do this on your own if you want to. You could pause the video and look at what you think would be the, keywords in each question. I will just go through and do it myself here. So I think in question number 1, we're looking for a space object that was named in honor of somebody.

We're going to, in question 2, look for a discovery that supported some astronomers who were reclassifying a planet. In question number 3, we're going to figure out somebody who resumed the work of a predecessor. Okay? And they were looking for a new planet. In question 4, we're going to look for somebody who helped a colleague discover a new planet.

Okay. These are the keywords that I would underline and now I'm gonna go back and try to scan for an answer about Mike Brown. Okay. So if you're looking for Mike Brown you go and quickly find him in paragraph e. There's his name.

Now your goal will be to figure out, okay, which one if any of these relate to Mike Brown? Can you figure that out? So as you look through this paragraph, you would just have to probably go and look at the information surrounding Mike Brown's name to see if it relates to anything in your questions. If you do that, you will find that in fact it does. That question number 2, his discovery provided support to astronomers who wanted to reclassify a planet, can be found here and the blue parts tell you which aspects of the paragraph relate to that.

So here we have a direct a word that's used directly in the question. Right? Reclassify, and here we've got reclassify. So International Astronomical Union ultimately reclassified Pluto. Okay.

So Pluto is a planet. Alright. And did Mike Brown provide support to that? Let's see. Mike Brown, who discovered Eris, a dwarf planet larger than Pluto, speculates that there are likely thousands of other rocks like Pluto orbiting in the Kuiper Belt outside of Neptune.

So this discovery supported the idea that Pluto ought to be reclassified and not be considered a planet anymore. Okay. So there's your answer for 2. Alright. So now where do we go?

Okay. Well, 2 other people I remember who were not mentioned very much and I remember them from the beginning of the the, article were Laverrier and Gal. Alright. So they would be another good choice, although you could probably start we'd go back with Tom Baugh as well, because he was not mentioned very often, but I would I'm going to go with, c and d. I'm gonna look for them because I remember they were mentioned, close to one another in the passage.

Okay. So we find their names if we go back and scan in paragraph a. Alright? And so now, again, your goal is to go through here and see if we can find something that relates to one of our questions. Indeed, when we do that, we find the answer to 4.

So Le Verrier predicted the position of his new planet and sent his calculations to a German astronomer astronomer Galle. With these coordinates, Galle discovered Neptune the very next day, exactly where Leveillier had predicted. Okay. So the correct answer here is Gal and we see from the question stem, a colleague helped him discover a new planet. Okay.

So that works for Gal because he was helped by Le Verrier who sent him his calculations, and those calculations helped him to discover a you may remember that in the middle of the article, Tambor discovered, a planet as well, and he did that with the help of Lowell. But, Gal was helped in a direct way by his colleague Le Verrier, whereas, Tomball was just continuing his predecessor's search for that planet. And in fact, when he discovered it, it was exactly where Lowell had said. So not direct help there. So, actually, for those of you reading really carefully, the answer for number 3 makes sense as tomah.

Okay. So this type of question is tough because you have to go back and really do a lot of good scanning to try to find the answers related to what's in the box and also related to the keywords in your passage. If you go back through and do it in a strategic way looking for things that you think you can find easily in the passage and not spend a lot of time, having to reread and rescan information, you can get through this type of question pretty efficiently.

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Here is the article mentioned in the transcription:

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Related Blog Posts

A After the discovery of Neptune in 1846, eager astronomers combed the Solar System for signs of another planet that might lie beyond this gas giant. They had good reason to believe one might exist: Neptune’s discovery had directly resulted from French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier’s hypothesis that disturbances in the orbit of Uranus were caused by the gravitational pull of an undiscovered planet. Le Verrier predicted the position of this new planet and sent his calculations to German astronomer Johann Galle. With these coordinates, Galle discovered Neptune the very next day—exactly where Le Verrier had predicted. But there remained some discrepancies in the gas giants’ orbits even with the discovery of the blue planet, so the hunt for yet another distant planet in the solar system forged onward.
B Percival Lowell, an early twentieth century astronomer, exhibited a particular obsession with this search for a ninth planet. Lowell christened this hypothetical new planet “Planet X,” and, in his 1915 Memoir on a Trans-Neptunian Planet, concluded that Planet X must have a mass roughly seven times that of Earth—about half that of Neptune.  When Lowell died suddenly in 1916, his observatory, led by the efforts of his widow, persisted in the search for the elusive Planet X.
C Fourteen years later, an ambitious budding astronomer from a Kansas farming family made the first major discovery in the search for Planet X. In 1929, twenty-three-year-old Clyde Tombaugh arrived at the Lowell Observatory and was given the task of systematically imaging the night sky. Tombaugh captured sections of the sky in pairs of images taken two weeks apart. He then placed the paired images into a machine called a blink comparator, which “blinked” rapidly between photos and created a time-lapse illusion of the movement of any planetary body. In February 1930, after searching for almost a year and examining nearly two million stars, Tombaugh discovered a moving object on photographic plates taken in the previous month. The object lay just six degrees from one of the two locations for Planet X that Lowell had suggested, and it seemed as though, at long last, Lowell had been vindicated.
D The object was named Pluto, in part to honor Percival Lowell, as his initials make up the first two letters of the word. However, it did not take long before astronomers began debating Pluto’s status as a planet. Observations showed that Pluto was six times dimmer than Lowell had predicted. It also had a far more elliptical orbit than any other planet in the solar system. In 1978, Pluto was found to be too small for its gravity to affect the gas giants, a discovery that resulted in a search for a tenth planet, which was eventually abandoned in the early 1990s when the Voyager 2 spacecraft found that irregularities in Uranus’s orbit were actually due to a slight overestimation of Neptune’s mass.
E In 1992, the discovery of numerous small, icy objects similar in size and orbit to Pluto led to a more vocal debate over whether it should remain a planet or whether Pluto and its asteroid neighbors should be given their own separate classification. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union ultimately reclassified Pluto and its friends as “dwarf planets,” leaving the Solar System, once again, with only eight planets. It is not likely that Pluto will ever be called an official planet again, either. Mike Brown, who discovered Eris, a dwarf planet larger than Pluto, in 2005, speculates that there are likely thousands of other “rocks” like Pluto orbiting in the Kuiper belt outside of Neptune.
F  Today, the astronomical community is largely in agreement that Planet X as it was originally conceived does not exist, but Planet X as a concept has been revived by a number of astronomers to explain other anomalies observed in the outer Solar System. In popular culture, Planet X has become a stand-in term for any undiscovered planet in the Solar System, regardless of whether or not it fits into Lowell’s original theory. Thus, real or not, Planet X remains a fixture in the astronomical universe.

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