A Yellow Illusion

C2 Proficiency · Open Cloze · Cambridge Ready original exercise

For questions 1–8, read the text below and think of the word which best fits each gap. Use only one word in each gap. There is an example at the beginning.

Walk into any library during exam season and you will see students working their way through textbooks, highlighter (0) ___ hand. Page after page turns yellow, and it feels like progress. That feeling, alas, is largely an illusion. Highlighting, it turns (1) ___ , does remarkably little to help us remember what we read. The trouble is that it demands so (2) ___ effort: we can mark a sentence as important without having understood a word of it. Much the same is true of rereading notes. The more familiar a text becomes, (3) ___ more convinced we are that we know it, yet recognising information is a far cry (4) ___ being able to recall it under pressure. What works much better, the evidence suggests, is to put ourselves to the test: to close the book and see how (5) ___ of it we can reconstruct. This is harder and, at (6) ___ initially, far more frustrating, but the effort is precisely the point. Struggling to retrieve a fact makes it (7) ___ the more likely to stick. Highlighters need not be thrown away, but they should be seen for (8) ___ they are: a way of marking a page, not of learning it.

A Yellow Illusion

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