9.3. The Jump to Band 7
Fix the three judgements that hold a Band 6 reader back.
The short version
NOT GIVEN against FALSE is the biggest single leak.
Headings chosen from gist, never from a repeated word.
The discipline to leave a text on time.
None of these is a vocabulary problem.
What is actually missing
A reader at this level already skims for a map and answers from the clause. The missing marks come from three judgements, not from vocabulary or from understanding the text.
Roughly what this step needs
Academic
Academic
General Training
General Training
Side by side
Finds the right sentence but marks FALSE when the fact is simply missing. Picks a heading because one of its words appears in the paragraph. Knows the timing rule but breaks it for one hard NOT GIVEN, and the last text pays for it.
Chooses NOT GIVEN when the text does not decide, whatever seems likely. Matches a heading to what the paragraph is about as a whole. Gives a hard item one more minute, makes a guess, and still leaves on time. That means about 20 minutes per Academic passage, or roughly 15, 20 and 25 minutes for the three General Training sections.
Rooftop beehives were introduced in several northern cities mainly as a visible greening project, not as a study of forage. In the last ten years, however, researchers have begun to treat hive density as an ecological variable. A 2017 survey of 30 roofs in Leeds, Manchester, and Sheffield found that honey yields were 20-30 per cent lower than in matched peri-urban gardens. Extra hives on the same roof did not close that gap. In several sites they widened it, because the same street trees were being worked by too many colonies. The mechanism is not only a shortage of flowers. Forage also has to be reached. Bees from a sixth-floor hive spend energy climbing out of a wind canyon before they reach a park. A follow-up trial in York moved half the study hives to first-floor terraces. Yields in the lower group rose within two seasons, though they did not return to the levels recorded in the peri-urban control gardens. City authorities often treat these findings as a request to ban urban hives. The researchers do not. They argue for a cap on colonies per roof, for native forage on the same block, and for leaving industrial estates unstocked until someone measures them. Those changes cost less than a ban and still leave a few hives as education tools. The open question is scale: most of the published work covers city-centre roofs and quiet residential streets. Motorways, ports, and 24-hour retail parks have barely been measured.
Statement: "Honey from the hives moved in York was of lower quality."
The passage says the yields never got back to the control level. But it says nothing about quality, so the statement is wrong. FALSE.
The sentence is about yield, not quality. For FALSE the text would have to say quality did not fall. It says nothing either way, so the text does not decide. NOT GIVEN.
Quiz time2 questions
Missing or contradicted?
TRUE, FALSE, or NOT GIVEN? Use the extract above.
The Leeds roofs produced less honey than the Sheffield roofs.
Where the missing marks are
Choose the change that adds the most marks.
A candidate scores 26 on Academic Reading. In practice papers, nearly every wrong answer is FALSE where the key says NOT GIVEN. Each wrong heading shares a word with the paragraph. Which change adds the most marks?
Tips
- Give NOT GIVEN a time limit
Decide in advance how long a statement gets. When it runs out, mark NOT GIVEN and move. Certainty on one statement does not buy the last text.
- Leave the text, not the question
Overrunning on a text costs a block of marks. Overrunning on one question costs one.
Recap
Mark FALSE only for a contradiction. Mark NOT GIVEN for an absence.
Choose headings from the gist of a paragraph.
Leave each text on schedule, whatever is unfinished.
Next: how the hour itself runs on the day.