Successfully pass the general culture and expression – BTS Assurance Method

Successfully passing the general culture and expression exam of the BTS Insurance using the writing method.

How to succeed in your general culture and expression exam for BTS Insurance?

The general culture exam lasts 4 hours, during these 4 hours, you will have two tasks to complete. Over the year, you will have studied two different topics, but only one will be chosen on the exam day.

We will review the presentation of each task then we will look at the method to succeed in this exam.

The first will be a synthesis of documents, it is scored out of 40 points. I recommend completing this task in 3 hours or 2 hours 30 minutes, but do not spend more than 3 hours, as you won’t have enough time for the second task. This first task resembles the French exam of the first-year preliminary tests. A corpus is given and you must find the common subject among the documents. Usually, you will have 4 documents of different natures (short stories, passages from novels, essays…)

You will need to write an objective synthesis, meaning without personal opinion, using pronouns “we” or “one”. It should also be concise, effective, and well-organized.

The method for the general culture and expression exam:

First, you need to study the paratext: analyze the author (famous name = look for their writing style), the writing code = First name should be in lowercase and the Last name in uppercase, analyze the title: the introduction code is that the full work should be underlined, and if it’s a part, the title should be in quotation marks.

Four-step method for writing the introduction

• 1/ Introduce the topic with a quote/a definition/current event or a document other than the corpus.
• 2/ Briefly present the documents then
• 3/ Pose the problematic.
• 4/ Present the two axes

Development:

Write in paragraphs, each paragraph corresponds to a sub-part.

Structure of each paragraph = first sentence = state the idea, then reformulate and analyze the documents.

Next, you should classify the documents in the following order: why this order? Because you need to organize documents from most to least informative and objective.

• 1/ Essay
• 2/ Passage from a novel or theater play
• 3/ Newspaper article
• 4/ Biography excerpt
• 5/ Poem
• 6/ Short story or image (painting, photo)
• 7/ Statistically, comic strip, graph

Dates help to classify the documents for comparison.

Once you’ve done all this, you can start reading the documents.

Highlight the main ideas in the texts and the key figures in the numerical documents. Then, you need to propose the problematic that shows the coherence of the corpus with the common, deliberate, logical problem.

Next, you should confront the documents in a two-column comparison table with one side listing the document name and the other side listing the main ideas.

After doing this, you must build a detailed outline based on the column of common ideas from your table. You need 2 main axes with 2 or 3 sub-parts, so you should find at least 4 ideas.

An idea must encompass all the documents.

Once your plan is complete, you can start writing.

The writing should take about 1 hour if the previous work was well done.

Don’t forget to create a transition between the two main parts. The transition should summarize the first part and introduce the second.

Conclusion in 3 steps:

• 1/ Summarize the main ideas of the plan
• 2/ Address the problematic based on the documents
• 3/ Open up to current events or another corpus document.

Things to do!!!

• Remember to indent; it breaks up your text and makes it more readable for the examiner.
• Proofread at the end of the exam.
• Manage your time well, not more than 3 hours for this exam.

Personal writing

The second task you will need to do is personal writing. It is scored out of 20 points and should take about 1 hour.

For this task, it is essential to have at least 4-5 documents in mind in order to succeed.

A question will be asked, and you must answer personally, so the use of “I” is mandatory. The goal of the exam is for you to give your reasoned opinion on a question related to the CGE theme in the form of a debate.

The structure must be argued and clear. The debate will have 2 theses, but it is tolerated to make only one thesis with 2 axes, although it’s preferable to follow the first method.

Start by analyzing the question.

Select key words, ensure understanding of their meaning and connection to the theme.

Select key words from a quote to develop a problematic.

Idea gathering

Reminder:

• The thesis reflects your opinion/viewpoint.
• The argument is the demonstration of the thesis, justification, proof of the idea.
• The example is the illustration of the argument; it must be concrete and based on general knowledge.
• Your draft should be divided into 2 columns, one per theme.
• The source can come from the course for ideas and examples.
• Key questions to ask yourself: who? what? how? why?
• The illustrative method: you can start from the example to formulate the argument – why?

Constructing the detailed plan

It should have 2 main parts. The first part should be the thesis you do not support, starting with the word “certainly”.

The second part is the affirmation of the accepted thesis, starting with the word “but”.

You should always have 2 or 3 sub-parts in each main part. The order of the sub-parts should go from least important to most important.

The research work is the most important; take it seriously. Doing it thoroughly will save you time during writing.

Let’s move on to writing: introduction in 3 steps:

• 1) Start with a definition, an outside text to the corpus, or a current event.
• 2) State the problematic.
• 3) Announce the plan.

Development

Within each sub-part: the first sentence should be the argument, the second should explain the argument, and the third should be an example that should be as detailed as possible.

The transition between the two main parts should be less than 4 lines.

Conclusion in 3 steps

• 1) Summarize the main ideas and arguments.
• 2) Address the problematic.
• 3) Open to current news or another document from a different corpus.

Things to do for the general culture and expression exam

• Use “I” with the present tense.
• Learn 4-5 documents that cover both notions to be able to exploit them.

The general culture and expression exam of BTS Assurance is not insurmountable when you know the methodology.

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