Prime Time 6, Coursebook mit Audio-CD und DVD

Researching effectively There are several different ways of finding out information about a certain topic. Research offline • Go to your school library or your local library. • Collect material from books, newspapers and magazines. • Talk to someone who knows a lot about the subject, e. g. English/American friends or exchange students at your school. • Write to an organisation or an agency that might be able to send you brochures, posters or information sheets, e. g. tourist offices, museums, government agencies, NGOs (= non-government organisations) or political parties. Research online There are two ways of doing this: 1. Use a subject guide or directory, e. g. Yahoo. Choose a category, sub-category, etc. This is helpful if you are researching a broad subject. 2. Use a search engine, e. g. Google, and enter the expression you are looking for, e. g. solar energy projects in Austria. It is better if you have a specific topic and clearly defined keywords. Tip A few search tips for search engines • Use inverted commas to search for a longer term (words in the exact order), e.g. searching for “United Nations Conference” will show results for “United Nations Conference” but not for “United” only. • Use the + sign to look for two or more words in the same document but not necessarily in the same order, e.g. searching for United + Nations will show you all documents containing the two words in any order: United Nations, Nations … United, United … Nations, etc. • Use the − sign to exclude words from your search. Searching for United -Nations (no space after the – sign!) will show results for United only, but will not show documents containing United AND Nations. • Describe what you need with as few words as possible. • If you get too many results, try to choose more specific keywords. • If you do not get the results that you are looking for, try a different search word. Think of other ways to describe the subject. T Checking results Do not believe everything you read! Anyone can publish anything on the internet. Some sources are more reliable than others, so always check how trustworthy the source is. • You can find out whether a website is reliable by looking at the URL 1 . Government sources (.gov) or university sites (.ac or .edu) are generally more reliable than private sites. • Check the country code top-level domain (e. g. .at = Austria, .uk = United Kingdom, .us = United States of America) in the URL. Do not use English pages from countries where English is not the first language. • Try to find out when the information was last updated. • Always cross-check your website information with other sources. Even if the source itself is not very trustwor- thy, it might have links to other websites that are reliable. Dealing with results • Always note down your sources so that you know where the information came from. • Always add the date and time when you have found the information on the internet. 1 URL: Uniform Resource Locator (address of a webpage) 43 Research skills Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv