e· ExamHubENGLISH WORKBOOK TRAINER
All books› Book 3› Section 1
SECTION 01 · Reading: separate texts

Reading

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

35 texts
Text 22Book 3 · Section 1 · 22 / 35
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 22
READING TEXT
  1. Men have known writing for at least six thousand years. The oldest kind of
  2. writing is picture writing. If you wanted to write “man”, you just drew a picture of
  3. a man; if you wanted to write “the man is eating”, you drew the picture of a man
  4. eating. A modern example of picture writing is Chinese. The Chinese characters do
  5. not look much like pictures because they have changed over the centuries, but
  6. that's how they began. a
  7. Picture writing isn't very convenient. You have to draw too many pictures. It's
  8. very hard to learn to read and write Chinese because you have to remember thousands
  9. of characters and what they stand for. .
  10. But gradually people developed marks that stand not for words or ideas but for
  11. sounds. This was a great thing as it was much simpler. There's no limit to the number
  12. of ideas that a language can express. But the number of phonemes in a language is
  13. small — twenty or thirty or forty. So man could now write with only twenty or forty
  14. marks. The ancient Phoenicians and the ancient Greeks developed this new system
  15. of writing.
  16. The Phoenicians wrote their words from right to left. The Greeks, too, wrote
  17. from right to left for quite a time, but then they changed and wrote from left to
  18. right, just as we do. The Greeks wrote all in large letters, with no interval between
  19. words or sentences.
QUESTION 1

In order to write “man”, ancient people

QUESTION 2

The word they in line 5 stands for

QUESTION 3

According to the text,

QUESTION 4

The sentence “There's no limit to the number of ideas that a language can express' means that a language

QUESTION 5

According to the text,

QUESTION 6

It's difficult to learn to write Chinese as

QUESTION 7

The word gradually in line 10 is NOT synonymous to

QUESTION 8

The word interval in line 18 means

QUESTION 9

We can tell from the text that

QUESTION 10

The text mainly discusses