INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
SAMPLE MID-TERM TEST Writing AE2 Task 1: Identify 6 cases of non-academic language in the text below and edit them to make an academic text. In the box below, write the original words/phrases in the left hand column and your editions in the right-hand column. You have an example. (30 pts) CAN MEDICATION CURE OBESITY IN CHILDREN? A Review of the Literature In March 2004, U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona called attention to a health problem in the United States that, until recently, we have overlooked: childhood obesity. Carmona highlighted that the “astounding” 15% child obesity rate constitutes an “epidemic.” Since the early ‘80s, that rate has “doubled in children and tripled in adolescents.” Now more than nine million children are classified as obese. While the traditional response to a medical epidemic is to hunt for a vaccine or a cure-all pill, childhood obesity has proven more elusive. Lacking success of recent initiatives suggests that medication mightn’t be the answer for the escalating problem. In this literature review, I will consider whether the use of medication is a promising approach for solving the childhood obesity problem by responding to the following questions:
1. What are the implications of childhood obesity? 2. Is medication effective at treating childhood obesity? 3. Is medication safe for children? 4. Is medication the best solution? Understanding the limitations of medical treatments for children highlights the complexity of the childhood obesity problem in the United States and underscores the need for physicians, advocacy groups, and policymakers to search for other solutions. What Are the Implications of Childhood Obesity? Obesity can be a devastating problem from both an individual and a societal perspective. Children are put at risk by obesity for a number of medical complications, including type 2 diabetes, hypertension, sleep apnea, and orthopedic problems (Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2004, p. 1). In the Table 4 below,
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researchers Hoppin and Taveras (2004) have said that obesity is often associated with psychological issues such as depression, anxiety, and binge eating. Obesity also poses serious problems for a society struggling to cope with rising health care costs. The cost of treating obesity currently totals $117 billion per year—a price, according to the Surgeon General, is “second only to the cost of [treating] tobacco use” (Carmona, 2004). Of course, as the number of children who suffer from obesity grows, long-term costs will increase. … Source: Diana Hacker (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006). Write your answer here. No. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
Original word/phrase
Possible edited word/phrase
‘80s
1980s
Task 2: Read the text below and create a graphic display or an outline that categorizes the points made in the text in the next page. (20 pts)
SOLVING SCHOOL CHEATING In my years of teaching, no student has ever admitted to a plagiary, even when questioned. The closest admission which I get is that someone "read it over for me," or "I used my dictionary." It is a hard truth: even when they are caught, cheaters continue to cheat. However, there is no harder task for a teacher than to give a "0"! There are some common factors of cheating which need to be actively challenged. Students cheat primarily to make their lives easier. Young people, under heavy parental pressure, find cheating a way to meet their parents' expectations. It is better to cheat than to have parents scold them again and again. Recently in schools, the question which is often heard is, "What did you get?" Peer pressure is another reason for student cheating. It is undesirable to say "I got a 'C'", especially in today's competitive schools. It is possible that the most important reason for cheating is what Katie Hafner referred to as "mental softness." It is the Internet that bears responsibility in this case. On the Internet, ideas and words used to express ideas can be accessed easily. Why do students have to think hard if the information is substantially provided? An easy life is available to the student cheater: a life without parental nagging, ridicule at school, or the need to work hard. With such "softness" evident in our students, the solutions to cheating must be hard ones. Parents
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need to accept their children's abilities, and to celebrate their accomplishments, no matter how small they are. Heavy pressure, by itself, cannot make a child smarter. Students must be encouraged to make comparisons on how much a peer has improved and on how hard that person had to work in order to obtain a grade. For some students, a "C" is a major achievement. The hardest challenge will be to reshape the Internet as a tool for creating higher order thinking, not one for avoiding difficult work. Teachers, instead of trying to keep students away from Internet resources, must make themselves aware of the Internet's potential for teaching. Research-based assignments (properly cited) that use the Internet should be assigned in every classroom. In these ways, we can work on the soft attitudes and remake them into a passion for disciplined work. Cheating is a danger to student achievements, one that needs to be challenged vigorously. Parents, who always want to see geniuses in their family and put frequent pressure on their children, should learn to ease up to some extent. Students can learn to admire each other's accomplishments without resorting to comparisons that offer little in judging a person's true worth. Furthermore, teachers can learn from their mistakes and begin to bring the Internet into their secluded classroom worlds. If we work on this together, our success will be assured. The graphic display or outline: ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Task 3: Write a compare/contrast essay (about 300 words) about life in Vietnam now and a decade ago. Pay attention to the use of academic language and a clear text structure (50 pts) …Today,
April 30, red flags are festooning the streets of Hanoi, the Vietnamese capital, to mark the fourth decade since the U.S.-backed South 3
Vietnamese government surrendered to communist North Vietnamese troops and ended the Vietnam War. But most Vietnamese are too young to remember the day in 1975 when Saigon fell, celebrated in Hanoi as Reunification Day. For the nearly 70 percent of the population under age 40, April 30 is just a day off from work or school. “No one our age talks about it,” Hien, a recent university graduate from Hanoi who gave only her first name, told me. “Most young people nowadays don’t really care about what happened. They just want to have fun.” Forty years after millions of Vietnamese were killed in the war, in which more than 58,000 Americans also died, locals I’ve spoken with bear little animosity toward the United States. During the three years I spent in Hanoi, I never witnessed hostility toward Americans. When I told Vietnamese I came from the U.S., they would smile and talk about American celebrities, like the pre-teen who told me she loved Beyoncé or the parking-lot attendant who shook my hand enthusiastically: “Ah, Obama!” And unlike me, my Vietnamese contemporaries grew up in the communist country that the war created. That country has changed dramatically over the course of their lives. When Nguyen and Hien were children, Vietnam had just begun to integrate into the global economy following a postwar decade of scarcity and stagnation. Since then, Vietnam has become one of East Asia’s fastest-growing economies, and the government's staunch communism has given way to a new pragmatism as it privatizes stateowned companies and seeks foreign investment. A recent Pew survey found that 95 percent of the Vietnamese people support free-market capitalism—a higher percentage than in any other country surveyed, including the United States. As a Hanoi secretary in her 30s told me: “The war is the past already. ... We care only about money. We don’t care about politics or history.” *** Students in Hanoi learn about the American War for the first time in elementary school, taking class trips to the capital’s Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum—which houses the embalmed remains of the communist leader who led the war for independence against the French—and Military History Museum. In the following years, they study the conflict in the context of the country’s history of fighting colonial powers, from its 10thcentury rebellion against China to its war against France beginning in the 1940s. “Each year, we learn the same thing in more detail. America started the war to help France get Vietnam back,” university student Luong Tuan Bach, 19, told me from a bench beside Hanoi’s Hoan Kiem Lake, where he sells Coca-Cola and iced tea to passing tourists to earn spending money. 4
Luong said he felt these lessons were important, and cited a well-known Ho Chi Minh poem: “Our people have to know our history.” But other young people I spoke with complained that history classes are too dry and tedious to make a lasting impression. “We started learning about the war in sixth grade, but I don't remember much. History is too boring, just texts after texts,” Nguyen Thi Huong, the university student, said. Those texts, which, as Hien recalled, depict a “hard but glorious” struggle to defeat the American invaders, present the official Vietnamese view. “We learned that even though the U.S. army was really mighty and their weapons were really modern, the Vietnamese country united and stood up for our freedom,” Thuy, a university student in Hanoi, told me. This attitude separates millennials from their parents and grandparents. “Older people might put communism on a pedestal, but for us it means very little. Young people care more about their own dreams, their own careers,” Nguyen, the university student, said. Luong, the soda vendor by the lake, hopes “to become a successful businessman” in the construction industry. Had he started his career 20 years ago, he might have strived to work for a government-run company. But state-owned businesses—once the cornerstone of Vietnam’s economy —have declined in recent years, weighed down by bad debt. Between 2000 and 2013, the number of state-run enterprises halved. Many have been privatized as part of the government’s ongoing economicrestructuring efforts, although officials still often refer to this process as “equitization” rather than “privatization.” Government agencies are also drawing fewer young employees. “Privatesector jobs pay a lot more than government jobs,” Trang, 28, explained to me. An event organizer for an international company, Trang never considered following in the footsteps of her parents, former government employees and Communist Party members who gave up both their jobs and political memberships when she was young. “My mom has her own grocery shop at home, so she doesn’t care about policy or the party,” she said. Like Trang’s mother, many Vietnamese have taken advantage of 1980s-era reforms that allowed them to open their own businesses. Today, Hanoi teems with entrepreneurial ambition. Vendors fill the sidewalks, selling everything from pedicures to pet goldfish. Families have converted parts of their houses to cafes, hair salons, and PC gaming parlors, imparting this same enterprising mindset in their children. Ray Greiner, an American war veteran who returned to Vietnam in 2011 to teach English, said most of his students wanted to own their own businesses. “That's a huge difference from the young people I know in the U.S.—and a huge difference from my generation as well,” Greiner told me. 5
As the growing middle class flocks to new malls like the palatial Vincom Royal City, a few Vietnamese entrepreneurs have reaped enormous profits. They include Pham Nhat Vuong, the country’s first billionaire and CEO of the company behind Royal City, and Dang Le Nguyen Vu, who founded Trung Nguyen Coffee and whose wealth, estimated at $100 million, inspired the nickname “Coffee King.” Nearly 400 people have made millions investing in the stock market, according to a local newspaper, some of them born after reunification. American fast-food franchises like McDonald’s and Starbucks opened their first branches in Vietnam in the past couple of years, and have been interpreted by some as a sign of the triumph of American-style capitalism. But this blatant embrace of the market economy does not mean that Vietnamese feel equally strongly about political reform. Unlike in Hong Kong, support for capitalism has not translated into a visible prodemocracy social movement. Vietnam remains a one-party state. While government sources report extremely— perhaps implausibly—high turnout for National Assembly elections, none of the young people I spoke with had much faith that voting matters. The lack of a pro-democracy movement in part reflects the realization that advocating radical political change would be risky. Few want to share the fate of the bloggers arrested for criticizing the government, although the Internet has made it more difficult to repress dissent. “In my time, just speaking out one time could put you in jail,” said a Hanoi man who was imprisoned in the 1970s for starting an organization to protest the American War. He asked that his name not be used. “Now, it’s easier for young people to get information and speak out their opinion. ... Maybe one or two times is OK, they just warn you. But if you do it over and over and make it seem like you’re trying to gather people, they can still put you in jail.” But more than that, young Vietnamese I’ve met see the potential for producing social change outside the formal political system. “We have activities to raise awareness about the environment and underprivileged people,” Trang told me. “But we don’t care about the government or any political stuff. The government controls everything.” While Trang’s generation is not rebelling against Communist Party leadership, its members are finding ways to communicate their views to the government. Young people have started using social media to express their concerns about development issues, such as a plan to build a cable 6
car through the world’s largest cave. And sometimes the government is even responsive. A Facebook campaign to stop Hanoi from chopping down thousands of old trees drew 20,000 supporters in one day, motivating city authorities to reverse the decision. “We are the new generation, we are the change,” blogger Duong Vu Hoang Anh told me during the campaign to stop the cable car, which seems to have had some success so far. “Vietnamese youth have participated in this issue like nothing else before. We realize that this decision should be ours.” …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
SAMPLE MID-TERM TEST AE2 WRITING – ANSWER KEY Task 1: 30 points a. Question type: Editing a non-academic text (6 cases of non-academic language) b. Objective: To assess students’ ability to write proper language for research papers. c. Scoring rubric:
Indicators of academic language:
Indicators of non-academic language:
Full forms
Short forms
Formal connectors
Informal connectors
Use of nominal groups (verbs made into nouns)
Use of pronouns
Use of the passive voice
Use of the active voice
Concise vocabulary
Informal vocabulary
Objective and impersonal point of view
Subjective and personal point of view
Suggestion: 5 pts for each acceptable edition. 0 is given as an example. No. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
Original word/phrase
Possible edited word/phrase
‘80s we have Lacking success mightn’t In this literature review, I will consider Said Of course
1980s have been The lack of success might not This literature review considers noted, indicated Obviously/ It is obvious that
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Task 2: 20 points a. Question type: Identifying text structure b. Objective: To assess students’ ability to understand a text and to elicit the organizational structure of that text. c. Scoring rubric: - Category (main idea) - Sub-categories (which develop the main idea) - Major details (which support the sub-categories) Possible text structure: Category: There are some common factors of cheating which need to be actively challenged. Sub- category 1: Reasons for cheating -
Parental pressure
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Peer pressure
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Availability of the Internet
Sub-category 2: Solutions to cheating -
Parents accept and motivate their children
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Students recognize their peers’ improvement and effort
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Teachers use the Internet properly
Task 3: 50 points a. Question type: Writing an academic Compare/contrast essay b. Objective: To assess students’ ability to write an academic essay with elements of research language c. Scoring rubric: Content
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All main points relevant to topic Essay question fully answers Organization
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Topic and purpose of the essay discussed in the introduction Each main point discussed in a paragraph All main points summarized and rephrased in the conclusion Coherence
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Paragraphs ordered in a systematic manner based on, for example, importance, priority, etc. Compare/contrast transitions are properly used. Style and Tone
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Formal writing with full forms Polite writing Academic vocabulary
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