e· ExamHubENGLISH WORKBOOK TRAINER
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SECTION 01 · Reading: separate texts

Reading

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

40 texts
Text 29Book 2 · Section 1 · 29 / 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 29
READING TEXT
  1. Benjamin Franklin is famous in the history of the United States because of
  2. his many and varied accomplishments later in his life, as a brilliant diplomat, as
  3. a scientist, as an inventor, as a philosopher, and as a public official. Early in his
  4. life, however, he was headed for a career as a printer. He was apprenticed at the
  5. age of twelve in a print shop that belonged to his half-brother James. Where
  6. faced with the unhappy prospect of spending nine years in an intolerable
  7. situation, Benjamin devised a way to get out of his contract as an apprentice
  8. printer in a rather unusual and creative way.
  9. Benjamin's half-brother James ran a weekly. newspaper, the New-England
  10. Courant, and it was in this paper that young Benjamin worked as an apprentice
  11. printer. Unbeknownst to his half-brother James, who owned the paper, a very
  12. young Benjamin wrote a series of humorous letters to the paper.
  13. He did not sign his own name to these letters. Instead, he used the pseudonym
  14. Mrs. Silence Dogood. In these letters he mocked the life around Boston. The
  15. letters amused the paper's readers, but they did not have the same effect on city
  16. officials.
  17. As a result of the letters, city officials forbade James to publish his
  18. newspaper.w James then decided to continue printing the paper using Benjamin's
  19. name rather than his own; in order to do this, however, James had to release
  20. Benjamin from his contract as an apprentice. After all, a newspaper could not
  21. be headed by an apprentice printer. After James had released Benjamin from his
  22. apprenticeship, he was to discover that Benjamin had written the letters that had
  23. caused so much trouble. He was angry that he had lost the right to publish
  24. his paper because of Benjamin. On his part, Benjamin was delighted to have
  25. been released from his contract as an apprentice.
  26. Later in his life, after he had achieved success in so many varied fields of
  27. endeavor, Ben Franklin did admit that he had not handled his dissatisfaction
  28. with his apprenticeship in the most mature way. However, he still appreciated
  29. the creative way that he had dealt with the problem.
QUESTION 1

The main idea of the text is that Benjamin Franklin

QUESTION 2

The expression headed for in line 4 could best be replaced by

QUESTION 3

How did young Benjamin feel about the idea of spending time as an apprentice printer?

QUESTION 4

It can be inferred from the text that Benjamin and James

QUESTION 5

The letters wthat Benjamin wrote

QUESTION 6

The word mocked in line 14 is closest in meaning to

QUESTION 7

The pronoun they in line 15 refers to

QUESTION 8

It is implied in the text that, when city officials read the letters, they

QUESTION 9

What eventually happened as a result of Benjamin's letters?

QUESTION 10

It's NOT mentioned in the text that Benjamin Franklin was recognized for his achievements in