TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE
Talk about the kind of holidays you like 3.3
G verb + -ing and to + infinitive
V accommodation and facilities
S identifying tone
Adaptive Practice
You’re planning to go on holiday and you’ve decided to try somewhere new. You could consider using a travel agent, but it’s easy to organise your own holiday online these days. All you need to do is visit a travel review site, spend time reading travellers’ comments and then choose the accommodation with the best reviews. Simple! Or is it? How do you know that what you are reading is genuine? Research shows that some hotels and holiday resorts pay people to write fake reviews. Of course, the websites manage to find and delete some of them, but they aren’t always successful. So, before you choose to spend your holiday budget on that ‘amazing five-star hotel’ or cruise ship that scored ten out of ten, read our tips and learn to spot a fake review. fake review READING A SPEAK Work in pairs. Discuss the questions. 1 Imagine you are planning a holiday. How do you choose where to stay? 2 Do you find online reviews helpful or not? Why? B SKIM Read How to spot a fake review quickly. Which of these sentences best describes the main purpose of the article? 1 To explain why you should never trust online travel reviews. 2 To teach readers how to spot fake online reviews when booking holidays. 3 To advertise a website that has reliable hotel reviews. C READ FOR DETAIL Read the text again. Do the statements refer to genuine reviews (G) or fake reviews (F)? 1 Some people write them for money. G / F 2 Reviewers frequently post a lot of them. G / F 3 They’re a mix of positives and negatives. G / F 4 They use a lot of exclamation marks. G / F 5 They may mention how big the rooms are. G / F
TIP ONE: Review the reviewers. Click on the reviewers’ profiles to see what else they’ve reviewed and when. Have they posted thousands of long reviews? Do they seem to post reviews every day? If so, congratulations! You’ve found a bot! TIP TWO: Nowhere is perfect – fact! Most genuine reviewers like to include a mix of positive and negative comments, so a review that’s 100% positive or negative is more likely to be fake. If you want to know what a hostel is really like, don’t read the very best and very worst reviews. Look at the ones in the middle. TIP THREE: FANTASTIC!!!!!!!! Fake reviewers like using capital letters, exclamation marks (!) and lots of extreme adjectives like ‘wonderful’, ‘amazing’ and ‘fantastic’. It can feel like you are being SHOUTED AT! Genuine reviewers usually avoid using so much extreme language. Instead, they often include helpful details like room size or prices. budget (n) the money you plan to spend on something extreme (adj) very strong / different from normal fake (adj) made to look like something real in order to trick people genuine (adj) real, rather than pretend or false spot (v) see and recognise travel agent (n) a person or company that arranges holidays GLOSSARY D READ FOR TONE Read the Identifying tone box . Then read the text again and choose the best answers. Identifying tone The tone of a text can help you understand the author’s opinion on the topic. • Look at the author’s choice of adjectives and adverbs. • Does the punctuation give you any clues? For example, exclamation marks, brackets or capital letters. • Look at the pronouns. Do they mainly refer to people (e.g. you ) or ideas (e.g. it, this )? 1 The writer uses ‘you’ in the first paragraphs to make the story feel more personal / serious . 2 The writer asks, ‘Or is it?’ to make the text feel more like a lecture / conversation . 3 The writer mentions research to show that the text is just for fun / has a serious message . 4 In Tip One, the writer presents the advice as a positive challenge / a negative warning . 5 In Tip Two, the writer uses an exclamation mark to show something is important / make a serious paragraph feel lighter . 6 The writer uses capital letters in Tip Three in order to make us smile / read carefully . E SPEAK Work in groups. Discuss the questions. 1 What other kinds of online reviews do you read or write, for example, films, books, games, etc.? 2 Do people rely too much on online reviews? Why?
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