Iwate Entrance English common mistakes
Iwate Entrance English · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Leaving all answer choices blank on a reading passage after hitting one sentence you cannot parse, instead of answering the questions that depend on other paragraphs.
Candidates treat a passage as one indivisible unit and freeze when local vocabulary fails; time pressure then makes the whole passage feel lost, so they abandon it.
What to do instead
Triage each passage: answer first the questions that cite line numbers or ask about names, numbers, and repeated key words, then return to inference items. Practise with a 1-minute scan where you mark the topic sentence of each paragraph before reading any question.
Choosing an option that repeats words copied verbatim from the passage rather than the option that paraphrases the same idea.
Under time pressure the eye rewards lexical overlap, and distractors in Japanese entrance exams are deliberately built from lifted phrases that reverse or distort the original meaning.
What to do instead
After locating the relevant sentence, cover the options and restate it in your own words in Japanese, then pick the English option closest to your restatement. Treat any option that copies three or more consecutive words from the text as suspect until verified.
Answering a 'what does the writer suggest' or 'what is the main idea' question with a true statement that appears in the passage but is only a supporting detail.
Candidates equate 'mentioned in the text' with 'correct answer' and do not distinguish the author's claim from an example or a counter-argument quoted from someone else.
What to do instead
Before answering global questions, write a one-line summary of each paragraph and check which option matches the overall direction, not one paragraph. Flag sentences introduced by 'for example', 'however', or attributed to another person as evidence, not thesis.
Filling a grammar blank by translating the Japanese meaning of each option and choosing the one that 'sounds right', without checking the syntactic slot (tense agreement, preposition collocation, participle vs. finite verb).
School study often drills meaning-based translation, so candidates never build a habit of testing structural fit; distractors are designed to be semantically plausible but grammatically impossible.
What to do instead
For each blank, first identify what the slot requires (subject, object, modifier, connector) and eliminate options by part of speech before comparing meaning. Keep a personal error log of collocations such as 'be responsible for', 'prevent X from doing', 'look forward to doing'.
Ignoring the word class of an unknown vocabulary item and guessing from a vaguely similar Japanese word, e.g. treating a noun as a verb or confusing 'economic/economical' or 'sensible/sensitive'.
Candidates rely on katakana loanwords and single-word translation memory rather than derivational morphology, and confusable pairs are a standard item type.
What to do instead
Practise splitting words into stem plus suffix to fix the part of speech before guessing meaning, and build contrast pairs (affect/effect, adopt/adapt, principal/principle) with one example sentence each rather than isolated translations.
Writing a free-composition answer that opens with a memorised template paragraph and never states a position or gives a concrete reason, so the content score collapses even though the grammar is clean.
Candidates prepare set phrases for safety and run out of planning time, producing fluent but empty text; raters reward task fulfilment, organisation, and specific support.
What to do instead
Spend the first three minutes on a two-line outline: position, two reasons, one example each. Write a direct thesis in the first sentence and make every body paragraph begin with a topic sentence that names its reason.
Producing a composition of only simple subject-verb-object sentences with no connectors, so the text reads as a list and loses coherence points.
Fear of grammatical error pushes candidates to avoid complex structures entirely; they have not automated relative clauses or concessive connectors under time pressure.
What to do instead
Pre-learn five reliable frames (although..., ... because..., which..., if..., not only... but also...) and deliberately insert at least three per essay. Rehearse a fixed set of discourse markers (first, moreover, in contrast, as a result) at paragraph boundaries.
Translating Japanese-to-English word by word in source order, producing sentences with missing subjects, wrong articles, and verbs placed at the end of clauses.
Japanese allows subject and object omission and verb-final order, so literal transfer creates ungrammatical English; candidates do not restructure before writing.
What to do instead
Read the whole Japanese sentence, identify who does what to whom, supply the omitted subject in English, then draft in English word order. After drafting, run three checks: subject present, verb agrees, articles before singular countable nouns.
Missing the answer to a listening question because attention lapses while waiting for the specific word, and then not reading the next question during the pause.
Candidates listen passively for keywords rather than predicting what information each question needs, and they spend the interval replaying the missed item instead of previewing.
What to do instead
Before each track plays, underline the question word (who, when, why, how much) and predict the answer type. If you miss an item, drop it immediately and use the pause to read the next question; practise with short dictation of numbers, times, and prices.
In sentence-reordering items, building a sequence from the meaning of individual words and ignoring fixed expressions, pronoun reference, and connector logic that determine the order.
Candidates treat the task as translation assembly rather than structural analysis, so they miss signals such as 'it' referring back to a noun or 'however' requiring a preceding contrast.
What to do instead
Locate the anchor first: an idiomatic chunk (as soon as, so that, too...to), a relative pronoun that must follow its antecedent, or a connector that must open a clause. Build outward from anchors and verify the final sentence by reading it aloud for agreement and reference.