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 6Book 2 · Section 1 · 6 / 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 6
READING TEXT
  1. a
  2. American jazz is a conglomeration of sounds borrowed from such varied
  3. sources as American and African folk music and Christian gospel songs. One of
  4. the recognizable characteristics of jazz is its use of improvisation: certain parts
  5. of the music are written out and played the same way by various performers,
  6. and other improvised parts are created spontaneously during a performance and
  7. vary widely from performer to performer.
  8. The earliest form of jazz was ragtime, lively songs or rags performed on the
  9. piano, and the best-known of the ragtime performers and composers was Scott
  10. Joplin. Born in 1868 to former slaves, Scott Joplin earned his living from a very
  11. early age playing the piano in bars along the Mississippi. One of his regular jobs
  12. was in the Maple Leaf Club in Sedalia, Missouri. It was there that he began
  13. writing more than 500 compositions that he was to produce, the most famous of
  14. which was “The Maple Leaf Rag.”
QUESTION 1

This text is about

QUESTION 2

The word conglomeration in line 1 could best be replaced by

QUESTION 3

The word improvisation in line 3 involves which of the following?

QUESTION 4

According to the text, ragtime was

QUESTION 5

Which of the following statements is true according to the text?