Autor: Jimena González Sanz.
Welcome everybody to the English section of this magazine. Today we are going to focus on EBAU. Well we know it is wintertime and most of you might be thinking about Christmas holidays but, you can spend a little of your time thinking about what will come in the next few months. What we propose is that instead of lying around you can devote a little of your time to English and how to face the exam. Your teachers are teaching you what contents you need to learn. What we will do is to provide you some tips to face the exam, introduce you the parts of the exam itself, provide some examples you can find online and finally focus on the specific parts of it.
The exam lasts 90 minutes and you will be given two options, A and B, so this is the first thing you need to do, choosing one of them. The exam is fully written in English and it starts with a text of about 250-300 words with a heading that provides you the topic. There are three main parts: comprehension, use of English and Writing. The marks you will gain for each part are specified next to each of the parts.
The comprehension part includes several questions. There will be true or false questions, multiple choice or finding synonyms, antonyms or definitions.
The use of English can include several options like, filling in the gaps with the correct word (adjective/adverb/noun/verb/…) or the correct form of the verb in brackets; turning sentences into the passive voice / active voice/ reported speech / direct speech. Other activities can be the type joining sentences using an appropriate linker; rewriting sentences without changing their meaning with a given beginning; finding the mistakes and rewriting a sentence correctly; completing conditional sentences or writing a question for the underlined word(s).
Finally, the writing part is an essay 100-150 words about a given topic mainly related to the reading comprehension text provided at the beginning.
What we recommend is that you try learning as much vocab as you can, irregular verbs, linkers and some idioms, most common ones at least. Practice reading and all the activities we have mentioned before, the more you practice the easiest they will be for you. It is highly recommended you practice with real tests you can find for example in this link.
This is all for today, next time we will focus on the written part. Hope it will be useful!
BW.
Jimena González Sanz.
