Part 4. Short talks on listening skills.

Listen to the short talk entitled "Represent the ideas clear and clean——outlining".

Some important words are taken away from the written passage. Supply the missing words.

Represent the ideas clear and clean ——outlining.

Outlining is a method of classifying and organizing ideas.

It is a skill very useful to languge learners when they are taking lecture notes, reading or writing a paper.

In listening, the skill of outlining reflects, to a certain extent, the listener's ability in understanding how the facts or ideas or the scattered pieces of information are related to one another.

People generally uses a system of Roman numerals, Arabic numbers and letters to show relationships.

There is a kind of standard form for using these symbols to show which ideas are most important.

The symbols used, in order of decreasing importance, are Roman numerals, capital letters, Arabic numbers, small letters and numbers in parentheses.

The placement of the topics on paper is also important.

The most important items are entered farther to the left, lesser items are entered farther and farther to the right.

Headings of equal importance are indented the same distance from the left margin.

The purpose of this indentation is to make each idea easy to see, and also to show just how it is related to the ideas before and after it.

No punctuation is needed at the end of an idea unless it's written as a complete sentence.

Outlining , as a fairly comprehensive and effective method in language learning, certainly deserves our attention and practice, particularly for advanced listeners.