Results for the “Check Your Understanding” Activities

Check Your Understanding: Texts

Answer: All of these are texts! Each one meets the criteria of containing information that we can explore and from which we can derive ideas and information.

Consider your favorite film: it has surface messages and a basic story, but it also has deeper meanings that work sort of like buried treasure.

Or take the story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” for example. On the surface, it’s about a little girl, a bear family, and what happens when she wanders into their forest home. But what about the deeper meanings. Is “Goldilocks” a commentary on the importance of privacy rights? A story of juvenile delinquency in its earliest stages? A text can have different meanings for different people.

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Check Your Understanding: Practicing Your Pre-reading Skills

There are no right or wrong answers here—the goal of this was simply to help you practice pre-reading. Keep it up!

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Check Your Understanding: Annotation

Again, there is no right or wrong answer—simply a chance for you to practice annotation.

Here’s a sample of what a short summary of this article might look like. Notice I mention the author and article in the first sentence:

In “Are We Loving Our National Parks to Death,” Dayton Duncan raises questions about the effects of millions of visitors on our national park lands. He talks about our parks’ origins and contrasts the parks’ early years with their condition now. He points at problems that include lack of camping space, roads in disrepair, and a general overcrowding, and he discusses ideas for limiting impacts—which may mean limiting visitors. He also brings up interesting points about the way climate change is affecting many of our national parks and forests. Ultimately, he asks the public for help in championing the parks with money and support.

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Check Your Understanding: Reflecting on What You’ve Read

How did this activity work for you? The way that e-communication is changing the ways we interact is certainly fascinating. Wouldn’t you agree?

Keep an eye on the emails, texts, and instant messages you receive in the next couple of days, watching how these people use periods and other punctuation. Do your observations echo the points made in the article?

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Check Your Understanding: Jargon

Hopefully, you’ll agree that using jargon requires some care and caution. You have to know your audience and understand their knowledge base in order to assess whether using jargon, technical language, and so forth will be a good idea.

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Check Your Understanding: Sentence Length

Playing with sentences is fun, isn’t it? Keep working with this: you’ll find that simply by playing with sentence length and word choice, you can completely change the tone and feel of your writing.

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Check Your Understanding: Summarizing a Text

How did you do with your summary? By now, you’ve probably practiced summary at least a couple of times while reading through this text.

Here are some of the key points your summary should have included:

• Annual physical exams are expensive and may be unnecessary.
• Preventative medicine is better than waiting until one gets sick and needs treatment.
• Biomarkers are metabolic indicators of one’s health.
• Scientists are building devices that can continuously track biomarkers.
• There are many hurdles to overcome before these devices can be trusted for wide use.

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Check Your Understanding: Reflect on Your Own Reading Practices

What did you discover about your own reading practices? These kinds of personal reflection can be tremendously helpful in terms of your own study skills. The better you become with reading at all levels and for all purposes, the easier your studies will become. You’ll save time, read more efficiently, and probably enjoy it more, too. Keep up the good work!

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Check Your Understanding: Plagiarism

All of the examples are a kind of plagiarism. Did you get them all correct? Remember: any time you use someone else’s intellectual property—of any kind—you must give them credit by acknowledging their name and providing information about the source.

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Check Your Understanding: Evaluating a Website

Hopefully you found that none of those sites passed the CRAP test. But I’m betting you had fun reading through at least one of them.

As you evaluate websites in the future, remember these examples and be sure to explore the sites carefully as you decide whether or not they’re reliable.

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Check Your Understanding: Reverse Image Search

Were you able to find the actual creator of the image? Or at least to track it back a little bit? Reverse image search can be a powerful student tool. Remember, an image created by someone else is there intellectual property. Your obligation is to locate and give credit to the person who owns the image. Keep practicing with this: no doubt image searches will become easier and more effective as technology improves.

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Check Your Understanding: Creating a Paraphrase

It was probably obvious to you pretty quickly that the second example is a stronger paraphrase. There is a clearer sense for my writing voice in it, with sentence structures that come more naturally to me and language that is my own.

The first example, by comparison, is a rather awkward attempt to preserve the original quote’s exact structures without directly copying the author’s words or phrases, and I’m not even sure it makes sense in a couple of spots (I had to reach for some similar-but-not-identical language). This is definitely an approach to avoid.

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Check Your Understanding: Work with Quotation

Options 1 and 4 are both correct ways of presenting the information–they deliver the quote accurately, introduce it, and give appropriate credit to the author.

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Check Your Understanding: Formatting Titles

Here are the correctly capitalized titles:

“People are Happier When They Spend Time in the Outdoors”

“Once upon a Time: A Tale of Lost Love”

Overcoming Adversity in Life

“Two People Apprehended in Attempt to Rob a Bank”

How did you do?

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Check Your Understanding:  Preliminary Research

How many of the sources on the first page of results are from Wikipedia?  Three.

Where is the gravity hill in South Dakota located?  Rapid City.

What later bands and musicians made explicit references to T. Rex? The Who, David Bowie, BA Robertson, The Ramones, R.E.M.

What is the first source listed in the “References” section at the end of the Wikipedia article?  Steve Huey.

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Check Your Understanding: Creating Citations

Your citation should look like this:

Faughnder, Ryan. “Inside the Deal that Brought Sony’s ‘Spider-Man’ Back to Marvel’s Cinematic Universe.” Los Angeles Times, tronc, 26 June, 2017, www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-sony-marvel-spider-man-20170626-story.html.