030 - Exam Preparation | ESL Podcast
ESL Conversation
A: How’s the studying going?
B: I haven’t started yet. I’m thinking of going on a caffeine bender and
pulling a couple of all-nighters
A: Cramming is the worst way to prepare for an exam. There is no way
your brain can process and absorb so much material in such a short time.
B: I used to cram all the time in high school and did just fine.
A: It can work on easier tests but don’t get over-confident. This exam is
going to test your understanding of the knowledge rather than just ask
you to recite facts. Have you at least been going to class and keeping up?
B: No, I’ve missed most of them. I’ve been in party mode all semester.
I’m usually good in physics, I was just hoping to skim over the chapter
summaries, do a few practice problems, and wing it for the most part.
A: This is all new material. It takes time for these concepts to really sink
in.
B: The test is all multiple-choice. The answers are right in front of you.
It’s all process of elimination.
A: That’s a huge misconception. Multiple-choice tests can be really
tough. Sometimes the answers are so similar and you really have to
know the material inside and out to do well.
B: We’ll see. How bad would you feel if I ended up beating you on this?
A: I can’t see it happening.
Key vocabulary and phrases that are discussed in the podcast:
Caffeine bender – bender is a slang term for going on a spree. It’s
usually when you do something unhealthy without taking a break from it.
An example would be, “I was on a drinking bender all weekend”.
All-nighters – This just means that you stay awake all night doing
something.
Cramming – method of studying where you try to learn a lot of
information in a very short time. Usually it doesn’t work very well and
students who cram are often a little lazy and procrastinate studying until
the last possible minute.
Keeping up – Staying up to date. Not falling behind. The sentence, “I’ve
been keeping up with my school work.” Means that you understand the
material taught up until that point. You can also talk about keeping up
with a race. Someone could say, “We should go for a bike ride today. Do
you think you will be able to keep up?”
Party mode – Being in some kind of a “mode” is just slang for saying
that you have been doing a lot of it lately, and your mood and feelings are
appropriate for doing that. You could say, “It’s been a great vacation. It
will be hard getting back into working mode”.
Skim – Read over quickly and briefly.
Wing it – Do something with very little or no preparation. “She has a
natural talent for giving speeches. I heard she didn’t prepare for that one
and was able to simply wing it”.
Sink in – You can talk about knowledge or concepts “sinking in”. If you
totally understand a concept you can say that it has “sunk in”. If you ask
someone, “How does it feel to have won the million dollars?” The person
might reply, “I don’t know, it still hasn’t sunk in”. That means they are
still so surprised, they haven’t really been able to fully accept what just
happened.
Process of elimination – This is a method of finding out an answer by [bad word] out all the possibilities except for the right one.
Misconception – Something that you wrongly believe to be [bad word]  It’s a [bad word] misconception that all Americans are rich.
Inside and out – Knowing something inside and out means that you
know something extremely well.