1

Outcomes: To know and practice the skills needed for

the exams.

Reading Skills : Inference Questions

2

Inference Questions• These questions are usually about a certain impression,

image or attitude created in a text.• They require you to take information from the text and

interpret what the writer really means.• Look at the following images – What are your impressions of

the people? Why?

Outcomes: To know and practice the skills needed for the exams.

3

Impressions and imagesCreating Inferences

• What impression do you get of the writer/an organisation /people?

• What image does this text create of the writer/an organisation /people?

• What are the writer’s attitudes to…?

Outcomes: To know and practice the skills needed for the exams.

4

Hints and Tips• This question is usually asking about the

writer’s viewpoint or impression. It is always a good start to state if they have a positive or negative viewpoint or impression.

• Always support your answer with evidence from the text, i.e. quotation.

• You cannot simply list in this answer you must expand on answers, picking out the relevant info and showing that you understand the text.Outcomes:

To know and practice the skills needed for the exams.

5

Jamie Oliver • Read the extracts Jamie Oliver and try to answer

this question:

What impressions of Jamie Oliver do you get from these two differing

extracts?

Outcomes: To know and practice the skills needed for the exams.

6

• Why we all hate Jamie Oliver - by Mecca Ibrahim

• Who is Jamie Oliver? Well, if you live in the USA there’s a fair chance you haven’t heard of him. If you live in the UK and you have a TV, you will see this cockney ‘chef’ appearing on countless adverts for Sainsbury’s supermarket as well as in his own food programmes.

• Jamie has this great ability to cause emotions in people. Love him or hate him, you can’t really be indifferent to him. My husband liked his first TV series and I really liked his second TV series. By the third series we both wanted to throw the trusty food mixer at the TV.

• How Jamie saved me, by a new-born chef

• TV chef Jamie Oliver taught 15 jobless teenagers how to run a restaurant. Tim Siadatan was one of the nine star pupils. Oliver has gambled £1.3 million of his own money to make the scheme a success, and the programme showed all the qualities that make the chef admirable: he is hard-working, loyal, responsible, generous and sympathetic, but even these qualities did not guarantee success. Viewers watched in incredulity as the students appeared to rebel against 27-year-old Oliver’s attempts to persuade them into working, opting instead to accuse him of using them to forward his own career, and often not turning up for work at all.

Outcomes: To know and practice the skills needed for the exams.

7

Ellen MacArthur• Read the article ‘What Ellen Did Next’.• Look at the first two columns (up to ‘Yet she did

so for a decade’)..What do you learn about Ellen MacArthur in this section of the

article? (10)

Outcomes: To know and practice the skills needed for the exams.

8

(This is the third style of Q)

Ellen MacArthur• Look at the rest of the article (from ‘She says she

is never bored’).• What are your impressions of Ellen

MacArthur in this section of the article? How does Cassandra Jardine create these impressions? (10) (This is the third style of Q)

Outcomes: To know and practice the skills needed for the exams.

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Word/Phrase from Text Impression it gives to the reader.

‘She says she felt terribly guilty when she saw the strain on her parent’s faces’