e· ExamHubENGLISH WORKBOOK TRAINER
All books› Book 2› Section 1
SECTION 01 · Reading: separate texts

Reading

Choose a text number. Its questions will appear on its own page.

40 texts
Text 24Book 2 · Section 1 · 24 / 40
How to solve: ReadingA text with several questions: main idea, details, word meaning and inference.

What it tests

Careful reading: finding the main idea, locating details, understanding a word from its context and drawing conclusions the text supports.

In the exam: part I, 10 tasks.

Step by step

  1. Read the questions first, so you know what to look for.
  2. Skim the whole text once for its topic and the author's purpose.
  3. For each question find the exact place in the text (line numbers help) and read the sentence before and after it.
  4. Choose the option that says the same thing in other words — not the one that copies the most words.
  5. For “main idea” questions pick the option that covers the whole text, not one paragraph.

Watch out for

  • An option that is true in real life but not stated in the text.
  • An option that repeats words from the text but changes the meaning (“always” instead of “often”, wrong date or person).
  • A detail that is correct but too narrow for a “main idea” question.

Example

Text: “It took 800 men seven years to build the bridge.” — The bridge was built in: a) one year b) seven years c) 800 days

b) The text says “seven years”; 800 is the number of men, not days.

Text 24
READING TEXT
  1. There has been a lot of confusion about Earth's age throughout history.
  2. Until the nineteenth century, scientists held a really mistaken belief about the
  3. age of our planet. Prior. to this time, they had thought that Earth was created
  4. around 4,000 or 5,000 B.C.
  5. In the middle of the nineteenth century, British physicist Lord Kelvin, the
  6. person that the Kelvin temperature scale is named after, came up with a very
  7. different idea about Earth's age. His idea may have been well-reasoned, but it
  8. was , unfortunately, also incorrect. Lord Kelvin determined Earth's age based
  9. upon its temperature. Scientists at the time understood that Earth's center was
  10. very hot, much hotter than Earth's surface. Lord Kelvin determined Earth's age
  11. by calculating how long it would take the surface to cool down from the
  12. scorching temperatures inside. Based on these calculations, Lord Kelvin
  13. calculated that Earth was approximately 100 mln. years old.
  14. Lord Kelvin's calculation of Earth's age was better than previous
  15. calculations, but it was still not an accurate estimate. It was not correct because
  16. Lord Kelvin did not understand the effect of radioactivity on the cooling of
  17. Earth's surface. Radioactivity occurs naturally on Earth, and radioactivity
  18. creates heat. The naturally occurring radioactivity on Earth has caused Earth to
  19. cool much less swiftly than Lord Kelvin had calculated. In the twentieth
  20. century, based on an understanding of the effect of radioactivity on the cooling
  21. of the Earth's surface, scientists calculated that Earth is between 4 and 5 billion
  22. years old.
QUESTION 1

The word confusion in line 1 is closest in meaning to

QUESTION 2

It can be inferred from paragraph 1 that early scientists believed that Earth was

QUESTION 3

The word scorching in line 12 is closest in meaning to

QUESTION 4

According to paragraph 2, Lord Kelvin

QUESTION 5

The word calculated in line 13 could best be replaced by

QUESTION 6

The author mentions “Lord Kelvin's calculation” at the beginning of paragraph 3 because

QUESTION 7

The word it in paragraph 3 refers to

QUESTION 8

Which of the following is NOT true about radiation, according to paragraph 3?

QUESTION 9

The expression much less swiftly in line 19 could best be replaced by

QUESTION 10

According to the text, early scientists