Information

Every question you have ever asked — How do I cook hoppers? Who won the cricket in 1996? What does "diagonal" mean? — has somewhere that can answer it. The skill isn't knowing everything; it's knowing where to look, reading it fast, and lifting out just the fact you came for. This unit is about being a smart hunter of information.

And that matters more now than ever, because today every answer is one tap away — but so is every wrong answer. A newspaper, a textbook and a random website all sound confident; part of this unit is learning which to trust for which job. Along the way you'll practise using a dictionary properly, making notes from a passage, writing a diary entry, and the present perfect passive — the tense behind "the studies of students have been affected by online games".

Think of information sources like tools in a kitchen — you wouldn't cut bread with a spoon. Each source is sharp for one job and blunt for others. A newspaper is brilliant for today's news but useless next week; a textbook gives the full picture but may be years out of date; a website is instant but anyone at all can publish on it. Before you trust a fact, ask "is this the right tool for this question?"

See how each paragraph answers the same three quiet questions: what does it contain? when is it published? what does it do for us? Once you spot that hidden pattern, comparing them is easy — line up the answers side by side. Newspapers come out daily and chase what's happening now; books appear whenever there's a need and dig into ideas that last. This habit of finding the shared skeleton under two passages is exactly what note-making and comparison questions reward.

Most students open a dictionary, grab the meaning, and slam it shut — and waste three-quarters of what the entry was offering. A dictionary entry is really a tiny passport for a word: it carries four pieces of identity at once. Train your eye to take all four, and you'll never again spell it right but say it wrong, or know the meaning but use it in the wrong slot.

The present perfect is the tense for a past action whose effect is still hanging around now. If you say "I have lost my key", you're not really talking about the moment you lost it — you're talking about now, where you're still locked out. It's the bridge tense: one end stands in the past, the other in the present, and it cares about the present end.

That's why we reach for it to talk about how the world has changed: "Online games have affected students' studies" — it happened over time, and the effect is right here today. The active build is simple: has / have + the past participle (V3).

• Online games have affected the studies of students.
• The internet has changed the way we read.
• People have allowed these changes.

Now turn it passive — when you care about the thing affected, not the doer — and you just slip one extra word, been, into the middle: has / have + been + V3. Think of "been" as the little hinge that swings the sentence from active to passive.

• The studies of students have been affected by online games.
• The way we read has been changed by the internet.
• These changes have been allowed by people.

Watch for the words that flag this tense — ever, never, just, already, yet, since, for, recently, so far; when one of those shows up, the present perfect is usually right. And mind the participle trap: it is "I have gone", never "I have went". The same catch hides in see → seen, eat → eaten, do → done, write → written, take → taken.