Coffee vs. Tea for the English - an attempt for summing-up the text into one sentence

An accurate summary

Summarize in one sentence within 75 words:

The essay:
The English have the reputation of being a nation of tea drinkers, but it wasn't always the case. By the end of the 17th century, the English were the biggest coffee drinkers in the Western world, and coffee houses became the places to be seen. As well as gossip, you could pick up talk of the latest intellectual developments in science, politics, and so on, in this age of scientific discovery and progress. At first coffee houses were very basic, a room with a bar at one end and a few plain tables and chairs. Customers paid a penny for a bowl - not a cup - of coffee. A polite young women was usually in charge of the bar because it was thought her presence would ensure that the customers didn't use bad language or cause any troubles. An added attraction was that coffee houses provided free newspapers and journals.

But people didn't go to the coffees just to drink coffee. They went to talk. They soon developed from simple cafes, where anyone with a penny could go for a drink and a chat, into clubs. People started to go to coffee houses where they would find other people who had the same jobs or who shared their interests and ideas, to talk and conduct business.

The great popularity of coffee houses lasted about a hundred years. In the later 18th century, increased trade with other countries made such luxuries as coffee cheaper and more easily available to the ordinary people. As a result people started to drink it at home. Also at this time more tea was imported from abroad, and the century of coffee house was replaced by the domestic tea-party as the typical English social occasion.

My summary:
Since the end of 17 century, coffee house, which was developed into a typical English social occasion for people to talk and conduct business while drinking coffee, appeared in England and gained popularity for about a hundred years, and in later 18th century it was replaced by domestic tea-party as result of increased international trading, which made coffee cheaper and more affordable by ordinary people, and more tea was imported.

*Sorry I couldn't move it to Writing feedback. after I realize I post it under wrong category. *

Ethan, There are times when you will need to be selective of the information that you provide in the single sentence. You cannot fit all of the information into one sentence. So the best thing that you can do is try to get the most easy to remember and informative data from the original presentation for your summary. When an article has this much information in it, you can bet that the exam takers will have different ways of presenting the sentence. There is no right or wrong way of presenting the sentence provided it remains informative and contains some, if not most of the presented data in the original article. However, you will be scored based upon the amount of relevant text that you can include in the single sentence. For this single sentence composition, I believe that your content would score 1, form would be 1 as well, grammar 1, vocabulary 2. Not a bad job if you ask me.

Hai @foyuliu.

It seems that you write your 75 words of summary in a sentence. I suggest you to divide your summary into two or three sentences to make it more natural. You can separate your summary by mentioning about coffee house in the first sentence and domestic tea-party in the second sentence. You can add closing sentence to make it looks more interesting.

Thanks. I hope it can be useful.

Thank you Mary and Ainun. I fall into another mistake, trying to put more content as possible, which is not good for exam, as writing more means more chances of mistakes in an exam. And there is obvious no need to copy all the descriptions about Coffee house..

Coffee house had been a typical English social occasion for about a century, and was replaced by tea-party in the later 18th century.

Ethan, for your reference I would just like to show you how I would have written this with 72 words composed of the information that I could remember and write within the allotted time:

Before domestic tea drinking became popular in the 18th century, the end of 17th century was represented by the rise of the coffee house where for a penny, coffee was served in a bowl instead of a cup and like minded coffee drinkers conversed in the presence of the earliest form of a barista, the young woman who kept the conversations peaceful and civilized among men who read free newspapers and journals.

Do your best to take as many notes as possible when you read and scan the article make sure that you get as much information as you can that is relevant to the discussion. Leave time for you to refer back to the original article if you can after you have done your draft writing. You might still have enough time to add information before you need to proofread and submit the single sentence.

Really appreciate your excellent sample and bearing my poor writing Mary:)
I will practice with the test set, and hope I will be able to post one with sentence that is live and vivid before taking the exam.