IELTS Research Reports

Anthony Green and Roger HawkeyAfter four minutes of discussion, the group failed to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion and decided tomove on. Returning to this section after editing the other items and following discussion of a numberof alternative suggestions, finally they settled on:‘CONE uses data from robotic devices instead of input from scientists’.On the Notes Completion Items:Item 6The item wording was ambiguous: ‘in’ could refer to time (1940, the intended key) orplace (North America). Adding ‘year when’ at the beginning was felt to be unnatural for aset of notes. The compromise arrived at involved changing the text provided to thecandidate to read:‘when bird was last seen’Item 7Item 8Item 9This was accepted‘involves’ was replaced by ‘causes’. In the following line, ‘old recordings’ was felt to beambiguous and ‘of target species’ was added to clarify thisThe item was seen to depend on syntax: ‘a’ in the item cued ‘match’ in the text. It couldbe unclear what the ‘match’ referred to. The item was revised to give: ‘results analysed toidentify any [matches] with original recordings’. The text was also edited so that ‘a match’became ‘matches’Item 10 This was acceptedItem 11 This was accepted following discussionItem 12 The use of ‘already’ was questioned. This was replaced with ‘have’. William pointed outthat ‘birds’ would also be correct here. The agreed item read: ‘birds that cameras have takenpictures of:’On the short answer questionsItem 13 Anne had not been able to find the correct answer and suggested replacing ‘professionalgroup’ with ‘professionals’. This was accepted.Item 14 This was accepted without changes.Item 15 William felt this was ambiguous as ‘from’ could be associated with the events or themonitoring: ‘events from the field’ or ‘monitoring events from the laboratory’. It was decidedthat ‘from’ should be replaced with ‘in’ in the text. The agreed item read ‘Where are thebiologists in the CONE study located when they are monitoring events’: the key was ‘(in)(their) laboratories’.Item 16 The word ‘feature’ was replaced with ‘function’.314 www.ielts.org