Integrated skills (summarizing, organizing ideas, cross-skill tasks)
What this domain tests
Integrated items ask you to take input in one form - a passage, a short talk, a chart or a table - and produce organised output in another: notes, a summary of a set length, a description of data, or a comparison of two texts.
Core rules
- Take notes in a fixed grid rather than in sentences: Who / What / Why / Result or Topic / Claim / Reason / Example. The grid becomes the skeleton of your summary.
- A summary keeps the main claim and its reasons, and deletes examples, statistics, names and repetition. One or two sentences per source paragraph is the right density.
- Paraphrase, never copy. Change the word class or the sentence frame: firms deliver separately → deliveries are not shared.
- Signal the relation between ideas explicitly: because, as a result, by contrast, both texts agree that.
- For chart tasks, state the overall trend first, then one or two figures. Do not list every number.
- Always re-read against the word limit; exceeding it usually cancels the organisational marks.
Worked example
Source: "In many cities, delivery vans now make up a quarter of morning traffic. Because each company runs its own routes, three vans may visit the same street within an hour. Some councils are therefore testing shared delivery points where parcels are left for several firms to collect." Summary (19 words): "Because competing delivery firms duplicate routes, some city councils are testing shared collection points to reduce morning traffic." Reasoning: the cause (duplicated routes) and the response (shared points) are kept; the statistic "a quarter" and the "three vans" illustration are dropped because they only support the cause. Because each company runs its own routes is compressed into competing firms duplicate routes - same meaning, new wording.
Traps
- Copying whole clauses from the source and calling it a summary.
- Adding your own opinion where only reporting is asked.
- Omitting the causal link, leaving a list of facts with no argument.
- Ignoring a second source in two-text tasks, so the comparison mark is lost.