Why a 20-word summary under the limit still fails
A 160-word passage reports that a ward's public library recorded 1,200 visits in 2022 and 3,000 in 2024, after evening hours were extended from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Membership rose from 210 to 460, and 70 per cent of the new members were students aged 14 to 18. The library added 400 Kannada titles and 90 English titles. The librarian says the biggest change is that girls now come in groups after school. The passage's own sentence of explanation is that the extension of hours, not the new books, brought in the after-school crowd.
A student's summary reads: 'The library became popular because it added 400 Kannada books and 90 English books and stayed open late.' It is 20 words, comfortably inside the 40-word limit. The teacher says it is accurate in its details but not a good summary, and the student cannot see why, since nothing in it is false.
1. Name two things the summary does that a summary should not do, and two things it omits that carry the passage's point.
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Two faults of method:
- It lists factors instead of relating them. 'Because ... and ...' places three causes side by side with no ranking, when the passage explicitly ranks them: the hours brought the crowd, the books did not. A summary must preserve the passage's causal claim, not flatten it into a list.
- It spends its words on detail-level figures. '400 Kannada books and 90 English books' are the passage's least load-bearing numbers. The 20 words are within the limit, but they are spent on the wrong material - a word limit is a ceiling, not a target to fill with the first figures encountered.
Two omissions that carry the point:
- The result is missing. No visits, no membership, no growth - the reader cannot tell whether anything changed. Growth is the passage's news.
- The change in who comes is missing. The shift to students, and especially girls arriving in groups after school, is the passage's human point and the librarian's own emphasis.
The student's defence - 'nothing in it is false' - misses the standard: a summary is judged on selection and emphasis, not only on accuracy. Every true sentence in the passage cannot fit, so the skill being tested is deciding which truths matter.
2. Rewrite the summary within 40 words, using the cause-effect relation, and state which numbers you kept.
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Model summary (36 words): 'When the ward library extended its evening hours to 8 p.m., visits rose from 1,200 to 3,000 and membership more than doubled, mostly among school students; the librarian says girls now come in groups.'
Numbers kept:
- 1,200 → 3,000 visits. One pair of before-and-after figures is enough to make the growth concrete, and visits measure use directly.
- 'More than doubled' for membership instead of 210 and 460 - the relation is what matters, and the phrase is shorter than two figures.
Numbers dropped: the 400 and 90 title counts (the passage itself says the books were not the cause), the exact membership figures, and the 70 per cent age band, which the phrase 'mostly among school students' already conveys.
The structure is deliberate: time clause (cause) → rise (effect) → who (human point). That order means a reader who stops after ten words still has the main claim. Keeping 'extended its evening hours' rather than 'stayed open late' also preserves the passage's own emphasis on the change, not just the state.
3. The student offers to fix the summary by adding 'visits rose from 1,200 to 3,000'. Evaluate that proposal.
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It improves the summary without fixing it. The addition supplies the missing result, which is genuine progress, and it costs only seven words, leaving room inside the limit.
But the underlying fault survives: the summary still presents the new books as a cause of the popularity, and the passage says the opposite. A reader of the revised version would come away believing that buying 400 Kannada titles and 90 English titles produced the crowd - a claim the passage explicitly rejects. Adding evidence to a wrong causal structure makes the error more convincing, which is worse than leaving it thin.
The correct move is substitution, not addition: delete the book counts and give their words to the cause ('extended its evening hours to 8 p.m.') and to the human detail. Roughly: cut 'because it added 400 Kannada books and 90 English books' and spend that space on the hours and the after-school students.
General principle worth carrying into the exam: when a summary fails, first check its structure, then its length. Adding detail to a misshapen summary usually pushes it over the word limit as well, and then two faults are being marked instead of one.