Summary completion from a box and matching sentence endings

A complete passage on why bystanders do not help, with a seven-gap summary and a box of words plus five sentence endings to match, solved step by step by a Band 8 reader.

Two tasks in this lesson depend on grammar as much as on meaning. In summary completion with a box you choose words from a list instead of copying from the passage, and in matching sentence endings you join half-sentences. In both, the grammar of the gap or the sentence tells you a great deal before you read a word of the text. This lesson uses one passage from psychology and shows how a Band 8 reader uses that grammar.

Do the task first. Allow 17 minutes. Answer questions 1 to 12 on paper, then read the walkthrough.

The passage

Why bystanders do not help

In March 1964 a young woman named Kitty Genovese was attacked and killed near her apartment building in New York City. Two weeks later a newspaper reported that thirty-eight neighbours had watched the attack and that none of them had called the police. The story shocked the public and came to stand for the supposed coldness of big-city life. Later investigations found that the newspaper had overstated how many people had seen the attack, which took place in several stages and partly out of sight, and that at least one neighbour had in fact telephoned the police. Whatever the truth, the story had one lasting effect. It made two psychologists ask why people so often fail to help strangers in trouble.

John Darley and Bibb Latané, who were both working in New York at the time, doubted that the answer lay in the character of city dwellers. They suggested that it lay in the situation. When several people witness an emergency, they argued, each person assumes that someone else will deal with it, and each therefore feels less personal responsibility for acting. They called this diffusion of responsibility. The more witnesses there are, the more thinly the responsibility is spread.

In 1968 they tested the idea. Student volunteers were placed in separate cubicles and told that they would discuss the problems of student life through an intercom, which would protect their privacy. One speaker, they were told, had a medical condition that sometimes caused seizures. Later that voice, which was in fact a recording, began to speak incoherently, said that he was having a seizure and asked for help, and then fell silent. Some participants believed that they were the only listener besides the speaker; others believed that four other students could also hear. Of the first group, more than four in five left their cubicle to report the emergency before the voice fell silent. Of the second group, fewer than a third did so, and those who did took longer to act. Afterwards, however, the participants who had failed to respond did not seem uncaring. Many were nervous and shaking, as if torn between helping and staying where they were.

A second force operates when the situation is unclear. Few emergencies announce themselves, and in an ambiguous moment people look at one another to see how worried they should be. If everyone else appears calm, each person concludes that nothing serious is happening, and their calm in turn reassures the others. Social psychologists call this pluralistic ignorance. Latané and Darley demonstrated it in a second experiment, in which students were filling in a questionnaire when smoke began to seep into the room through a vent. About three-quarters of those who were alone reported it. When two other people, who had been told to stay calm, sat beside the participant and did nothing, only about one in ten reported the smoke.

The two psychologists later set out a model of five steps through which a person must pass before helping: noticing the event, interpreting it as an emergency, accepting responsibility, deciding how to help and, finally, acting. A failure at any step stops the process, and the presence of other people can interfere with the second and third steps in particular.

The bystander effect is not universal. A review of more than a hundred studies, published in 2011, found that the tendency to hold back was much weaker when the emergency was clearly dangerous, since it is then obvious that help is needed and the cost of doing nothing is high. Recordings from security cameras have added a further surprise. Researchers who analysed footage of more than two hundred street fights and other conflicts in Amsterdam, Cape Town and Lancaster found that in nine cases out of ten at least one bystander tried to help, and that the chance of someone intervening rose, rather than fell, as the number of onlookers grew. Studies of this kind do not contradict the early experiments, which were designed to isolate one process in a laboratory, but they suggest that real streets contain more helpers than the first psychologists feared. The practical lesson that remains is a simple one: if you need help in a crowd, do not appeal to everyone. Point at one person and give a specific instruction.

The questions

Questions 1 to 7

Complete the summary using the list of words, A to J, below. Write the correct letter, A to J.

The explanations offered by Darley and Latané

Darley and Latané suggested that a failure to help is explained by the social 1 … in which people find themselves, not by a weakness of character. With several people present, each person feels less personal 2 … , a process known as diffusion of responsibility. In their best-known experiment, students sat in separate 3 … and heard, over an intercom, a fellow student who appeared to be having a 4 … . The more people the participant believed to be listening, the less likely he or she was to leave and report the problem. A second explanation is that people decide whether an event is an 5 … by watching others. If everyone stays calm, everyone concludes that nothing is wrong, a state described as 6 … ignorance. This was shown when students in a room that slowly filled with 7 … were far less likely to report it when two other people ignored it.

List of words

A. cubicles B. danger C. emergency D. moral E. pluralistic F. police G. responsibility H. seizure I. situation J. smoke

Questions 8 to 12

Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A to G, below. Write the correct letter, A to G.

8. Later investigations of the Genovese case found that the newspaper account
9. In the intercom experiment, the participants who believed that others were listening
10. According to the five-step model, a person who does not interpret an event as an emergency
11. The 2011 review found that bystanders were less affected by the presence of others when
12. Analysis of security-camera footage from three countries suggested that in street conflicts

A. were slower to report the problem. B. had been trained in first aid. C. had exaggerated the number of witnesses. D. someone from the crowd usually stepped in. E. knew the victim personally. F. cannot reach the stages that lead to action. G. the situation was dangerous.

Stop here and do the task before you continue.

The walkthrough

Step 0: Reading the summary before the passage

For both tasks a Band 8 reader begins with the task, not the passage, because the task is a compressed version of the text.

The summary. Reading it through without the box shows what the passage must contain: Darley and Latané; failure to help explained by the situation; diffusion of responsibility; an intercom experiment with a seizure; pluralistic ignorance; a smoke experiment. That is nearly a full outline of paragraphs 2 to 4. The gaps are in passage order, so the answer to 2 is between the answers to 1 and 3. And since the summary opens with the names, the reader knows where to start looking: from “John Darley and Bibb Latané” in the second paragraph.

The box. The reader does not memorise the ten words. They do two things. They sort the words by grammar:

and they note that the box has ten words for seven gaps, so three are distractors.

The endings. The sentence beginnings (8 to 12) are in passage order, and each refers to a different part of the text: the Genovese case (paragraph 1), the intercom experiment (paragraph 3), the five steps (paragraph 5), the 2011 review and the camera footage (paragraph 6). The endings are in random order, there are seven endings for five beginnings, and two of them will be unused.

Band 6 habit: starting with the passage and reading it all in detail, then going through the box one word at a time and choosing whichever word “feels right”. That is the slowest and least accurate way to do these tasks.

Step 1: Questions 1 to 7, summary with a box

The Band 8 reader treats every gap as a puzzle in two parts. Part 1: grammar. What kind of word fits this gap: noun, adjective, plural, singular? Is there an article (a, an) before it? Part 2: meaning. Which paragraph of the passage says this, and what word does the passage use or paraphrase?

Question 1: “the social ___ in which people find themselves, not by a weakness of character.”

• Grammar: a singular noun after “social”; “in which people find themselves” suggests a circumstance. Candidates: situation, danger, emergency.
• Where: paragraph 2. “doubted that the answer lay in the character of city dwellers. They suggested that it lay in the situation.”
• Paraphrase: “weakness of character” = “the character of city dwellers”; “in which people find themselves” = “lay in”.
• Answer: I (situation). The tempting wrong answer is emergency, because the whole passage is about emergencies. But “the social emergency in which people find themselves” does not make sense, and the passage never says the cause is the emergency. A Band 6 reader chooses the word that is most frequent in the passage.

Question 2: “each person feels less personal ___”

• Grammar: a noun after “personal”, uncountable (no article, no plural).
• Where: paragraph 2. “each therefore feels less personal responsibility for acting.”
• Answer: G (responsibility). The summary repeats the passage almost word for word here, so the Band 8 reader moves on. The summary also names the process (“diffusion of responsibility”), which confirms it.

Question 3: “students sat in separate ___”

• Grammar: a plural noun after “separate”. Candidates: cubicles (plural), situation? (singular, no).
• Where: paragraph 3. “Student volunteers were placed in separate cubicles.”
• Answer: A (cubicles). Grammar eliminates every singular word, and meaning does the rest.

Question 4: “a fellow student who appeared to be having a ___”

• Grammar: “a” (not “an”) before the gap, so the word begins with a consonant sound. A singular noun.
• Where: paragraph 3. “said that he was having a seizure and asked for help.”
• Paraphrase: “appeared to be having” = “began to speak incoherently, said that he was having”.
• Answer: H (seizure). The article a eliminates emergency here, because “a emergency” is impossible. The passage talks about the emergency repeatedly, and that is the trap: a Band 6 reader writes emergency here, and then has no word left for question 5.

Question 5: “people decide whether an event is an ___ by watching others.”

• Grammar: “an” before the gap, so the word begins with a vowel sound.
• Where: paragraph 4 and paragraph 5. “in an ambiguous moment people look at one another to see how worried they should be”; “interpreting it as an emergency”.
• Answer: C (emergency). The only noun in the box that begins with a vowel sound is emergency. The meaning agrees: people use others’ reactions to decide whether it is an emergency.

Question 6: “a state described as ___ ignorance.”

• Grammar: an adjective before the noun ignorance. The box has two adjectives: moral and pluralistic.
• Where: paragraph 4. “Social psychologists call this pluralistic ignorance.”
• Answer: E (pluralistic). Moral is the distractor: the passage never says the problem is moral, and it explicitly says the participants “did not seem uncaring”. If you did not know the term, grammar still leaves you two words, and the passage stops you choosing the wrong one.

Question 7: “a room that slowly filled with ___”

• Grammar: “filled with” followed by an uncountable or plural noun.
• Where: paragraph 4. “smoke began to seep into the room through a vent.”
• Paraphrase: “slowly filled with” = “began to seep into the room”.
• Answer: J (smoke). Danger is the grammatical distractor (“filled with danger”), but the passage names the substance.

Distractors left over: B (danger), D (moral), F (police). Each appears or fits in a way that tempts you but matches no gap. Police is in paragraph 1 (“none of them had called the police”), which is another example of a word that is in the passage but in the wrong place.

What a Band 6 reader does at this point. They copy a word that is in the passage near the gap without checking whether it fits the summary’s grammar and meaning. In box tasks, the word in the passage next to the paraphrase is usually right, while the word that is most frequent in the passage is often wrong.

Step 2: Questions 8 to 12, matching sentence endings

The method is: find the sentence in the passage, predict the ending in your own words, look for the ending that means the same, and then check that it fits grammatically.

Question 8: “Later investigations of the Genovese case found that the newspaper account ___”

• Where: paragraph 1. “Later investigations found that the newspaper had overstated how many people had seen the attack.”
• Prediction: it had made the number of witnesses too high.
• Answer: C. “had exaggerated the number of witnesses” = “had overstated how many people had seen”. Note that “found that the newspaper had …” in the beginning matches the passage’s grammatical frame exactly, so the ending must be a past perfect verb phrase.

Question 9: “In the intercom experiment, the participants who believed that others were listening ___”

• Where: paragraph 3. “Of the second group, fewer than a third did so, and those who did took longer to act.”
• Prediction: they were less likely and slower to react.
• Answer: A. “were slower to report the problem” = “took longer to act”. The paraphrase is not complete (the passage also says most did not act before the voice fell silent), but A is the only ending that is both true of the passage and grammatical. B (trained in first aid) and E (knew the victim) are not mentioned.

Question 10: “According to the five-step model, a person who does not interpret an event as an emergency ___”

• Where: paragraph 5. The steps are listed in order: noticing, interpreting, accepting responsibility, deciding, acting. “A failure at any step stops the process.”
• Prediction: the person will not continue to the later steps, and will not act.
• Answer: F. “cannot reach the stages that lead to action” = “a failure at any step stops the process”. The beginning has the verb does not interpret, and the ending has the verb cannot reach: both are in the present tense and the grammar matches.

Question 11: “The 2011 review found that bystanders were less affected by the presence of others when ___”

• Where: paragraph 6. “the tendency to hold back was much weaker when the emergency was clearly dangerous.”
• Paraphrase: “were less affected by the presence of others” = “the tendency to hold back was much weaker”; “the situation was dangerous” = “the emergency was clearly dangerous”.
• Answer: G. Notice that the ending is a complete clause (subject plus verb), whereas the others are verb phrases. The word when at the end of the beginning demands a clause, and G is the only ending that works grammatically. That is a rare case in which grammar alone gives the answer.

Question 12: “Analysis of security-camera footage from three countries suggested that in street conflicts ___”

• Where: paragraph 6. “in nine cases out of ten at least one bystander tried to help.”
• Paraphrase: “someone from the crowd usually stepped in” = “at least one bystander tried to help” in “nine cases out of ten”.
• Answer: D. The ending has a subject (someone from the crowd), which is correct after “in street conflicts”. The wrong endings are A (a repetition of the experiment’s result, which the footage reversed) and C (the newspaper).

The unused endings: B (trained in first aid) and E (knew the victim personally). Neither appears anywhere in the passage. These distractors sound reasonable because they are things that might influence helping. That is exactly what makes them NOT GIVEN in the passage.

Step 3: Checking in two minutes

• Letters, not words, are required in both tasks. Writing “situation” instead of “I” can lose the mark.
• Each letter is used only once in the summary. If a word appears twice, one answer is wrong.
• Read each completed sentence in full: does it make sense and is it grammatically correct?
• In the endings task, check that you have used five different endings, and that you have not chosen an ending that is false just because it is a true fact elsewhere in the passage.

Answer key

What to take from your own result

• Wrong choices in the summary gaps? Did you choose the most frequent word in the passage? Check the article and the part of speech first.
• Several wrong endings? You may have chosen the ending that sounded most natural in real life. Only the passage counts, and two endings are unsupported by it.
• Slow on the summary? Read it first and answer in passage order. The gaps cluster in paragraphs 2 to 4, so most of the passage need not be read in detail at all.

Key points

• Read the summary or the sentence beginnings first. They outline the part of the passage you need, and the gaps follow its order.
• In a box task, decide what type of word fits each gap before looking at the box: an article, a plural, an adjective and a preceding preposition are all clues.
• A word that is frequent in the passage is often a distractor. The correct word is the one the passage uses, or paraphrases, in the sentence you have located.
• In a box task there are more words than gaps, and in an endings task more endings than beginnings.
• For sentence endings, predict the ending in your own words, then check meaning and grammar together.
• Write the letter when the task asks for a letter.

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