C1 Reading tips CAE READING AND USE OF ENGLISH PART 5
Time management: Part 5 is a long text with six comprehension questions. Each correct answer is
Time management is the difference between a pass and a fail! Here at CAE worth 2 points. The text is loooong, the answers all seem to be the same.... it's a
Exam Tips we recommend you use the 80/20 rule to help you. test of concentration, understanding, and of your patience. Remember that time
you saved in parts 1 to 4? You might burn some of it here... [Note - there's a lot
of text in this section - studying this page on a desktop will be much better than
on your smartphone.)
1. The basics
Read everything: It's not enough to read the text carefully. You have to read the
questions and answers carefully too!
The answers are sequential. The answer to question 5 comes after the answer
to question 4 in the text.
The only exception might be the 6th question - sometimes it asks you a
question about the whole text. Another reason to read the questions carefully!
Leave your own ideas and biases at the door. You might be an expert in the topic
The 80/20 rule says that 20% of your time gives you 80% of your results. When - if anything, this is a disadvantage! You have to read the text for what the writer
you get dressed in the morning you spend 2 minutes putting on your clothes says, not what you assume he says.
and 8 minutes getting your hair just perfect. When you get a new phone you
Always question your answers - overconfidence is especially dangerous in this
spend 2 hours learning how to use it, and 8 hours changing the wallpaper and
part of the exam.
the ringtone...
2. How to get better
What this means in the CAE exam is - go through the exam as fast as you can,
because you will get 80% of your final score quite quickly. Then with the time The surest way to improve on this part of the exam is to read a lot in English. My
you have at the end you can try to answer those other questions you weren't students who read 'for fun' do this part much more quickly, much more
quite sure about. accurately, than the students who hate reading. So... read! (There are a lot of
things you can read - romantic novels, crime fiction, Game of Thrones. Don't feel
you have to read something super boring.)
3. Look out for traps It would make sense to do the second question LAST. Why? Simply because
you’ll end up reading the 4 texts a few times to answer questions 1, 3, and 4. So
Everything here is a trap. (Well, 75%.) Why do all the answers seem plausible? when it comes to question 2 you’ll have some idea of where to look. This should
Because if you just read the text quickly every answer seems possible. be the most efficient method of doing this task.
CAE READING AND USE OF ENGLISH PART 6
CAE READING AND USE OF ENGLISH PART 7
In part 6 you read 4 short texts from different writers. You have to answer 4 Cambridge calls part 7 a 'gapped text' activity. You get a long text with six
questions, each worth 2 points. You have to understand each writer's opinion on paragraphs removed (leaving 6 gaps, hence the name of the task). Your job to is
various topics and compare them with the opinions of the others. You might put the paragraphs back into the right place. It's quite hard, and Cambridge
have to read each text several times, so it could use up a lot of your precious make it harder by including an extra paragraph that doesn't fit into any of the
exam minutes. spaces.
1. How not to do it Part 7 is a hard part of the exam that gets easier the more you practice.
Even in the simple example above it's easy to get things wrong if you go too
quickly and don't double-check your answers. For example, for question [1] a lot
of students would choose D because it seems to be the most different. But the
correct answer is, of course, B - he's the only one who says pasta is the best
food. If you only skim read, it's possible to mistake 'pizza' and 'pasta' - we often
only see the first and last letters of words.
2. Order, Order
A decent tip here from Cambridge themselves. If you have a set of questions like
this:
Which person shares A’s view about bananas?
Which person has a different opinion from the others about pineapples?
1. A good key fits only one lock
Which person disagrees with B’s view on pears?
Which person has a similar opinion to C regarding vegetables? The 'key' to this task is to know that each gap in the text can only be filled by
one of the paragraphs. Read any good text and it'll be so full of clues about the
structure that you could run it through a shredder and - if you had enough time -
recreate it. Don't believe me? The police do it all the time! CAE READING AND USE OF ENGLISH PART 8
- How to start Part 8 gives you 4-6 short texts and 10 questions. It's called 'Multiple Matching'
because you have to match the ten questions with the short texts. Most
Read the whole text. Read all the paragraphs. students find it easier than the other parts of the reading test and can do it
quicker.
Then pay special attention to the sentences before and after the gap - a lot of
the most important information will be there. You don't have to start with the 1. How to do it
first gap - always start with the one you think is going to be easiest and leave
the hardest ones till later. The first answer you choose will be a 1 in 7 chance, Start by reading the introduction to the task and the title of the texts. The intro
but the last one is 1 in 2. will say something like 'You are going to read an article about the importance of
money in sports' and the title might be 'Can You Buy a Gold Medal?' Even if you
But be careful! Sometimes there won't be a clue in the sentence immediately don't like sport you will have some idea of vocabulary and topics to expect.
before or after the gap. You really do need to read the whole text to get its
meaning - sometimes the 'clue' is the entire paragraph. Next, scan the first text - not too quickly or you'll just have to read it again. Then
read question 1 and underline the keywords. Were those keywords (or their
2. Get a clue synonyms) mentioned in the text? If not, go to question 2. If yes, find the place in
the text where it was mentioned and read it more carefully. If it's a match, write
Detectives use clues to fill in gaps.' You can develop similar skills by looking for
A in the first box.
clues in your Cambridge part 7 text.
Once you've been through the ten questions, you should have between 2 and 4
What sort of clues are in a text?
questions with an A next to them.
Names and pronouns (Jack... he... this...)
Now repeat the process with text B. It will be a little quicker this time because
Chronology (Then... Finally...)
instead of going through 10 questions you're only going through 6-8. Repeat
Quotation marks ("I couldn't believe it.")
with C and D (and E, F, if there are more than 4 texts).
Contrast words (However, but)
Verb tenses (had gone... will have finished) This is the most efficient way to do the Multiple Matching exercise - if you have
Cause and effect (Therefore... as a result...) one or two empty spaces at the end, don't panic. You should have time to try to
Repetition (in other words...) find them.
It IS possible that there could be 5 matches to one letter, but it’s way more likely
that 4 would be the maximum.
2. Problems and Pitfalls
As always, Cambridge give you plenty of opportunity to choose the wrong
answer! The most common trap is with exact word matches - if a keyword in the
text is the exact same as the word in the question, be careful! It's almost
certainly not the answer.
Be careful of partial matches. If a question says, 'Which text says that the
money spent on sports has always had a political dimension?' then it isn't
enough to find a text that mentions politicians, or mentions the current situation.
You must find something that matches all the keywords - [money spent on
sports] [always] [political].
Finally, a huge problem will be not knowing the meaning of one or more
keywords. If you don't understand a certain word in the exam, you won't be
alone! (If you understand every word in the Advanced exam maybe you should
be studying a Proficiency course!) While preparing for the reading exam, practice
the skill of guessing the meanings of unfamiliar words.
Tips!
- Practice guessing the meanings of words. Predict the meaning, based on the
context, before you look it up in the dictionary.
- Take a practice test and photocopy the texts, without looking at the questions.
Then take some time to create questions of your own. This will be hard, but
when you compare your questions with the ones from Cambridge, you'll learn a
lot about how the tests are created. Knowing how Cambridge create the
questions will really help you to answer the questions! Try it!
