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.

35 texts
Text 34Book 3 · Section 1 · 34 / 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 34
READING TEXT
  1. Are you a left-handed individual in a right-handed world? How did that happen,
  2. and is it good or bad? Geneticists and behaviorists have studied this question
  3. extensively and have come up with some interesting and enlightening information.
  4. If you are a twin, you have a greater chance of being left-handed than if you
  5. were a single birth, but there is no evidence that left-handers are more clumsy than
  6. right-handers, and there is trifling evidence that hand preference has anything to do
  7. with intelligence. Leonardo da Vinci, one of the world's intellectual geniuses, was
  8. left-handed.
  9. In human beings, hand preference begins to develop at about the seventh month
  10. following birth. Then one side of the brain initiates dominance over the other. The
  11. left side of the brain regulates the right portion of the body — hand, eye and foot.
  12. The right side of the brain supervises the left.
  13. In 1998, a study suggested that approximately 7 to 10 percent of the adult
  14. population is left-handed, and that left-handedness is more common among males
  15. than females. Still only about four percent of the population is exclusively left or
  16. right oriented. Most right-handed people have things they do better with their left
  17. hand, while most south-paws have things they do with their right hand.
  18. Though left-handers constitute less than 10 percent of the general population, five
  19. of the last seven US presidents have been left-handed: Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan,
  20. George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. So was Obama's opponent,
  21. John McCain.
QUESTION 1

According to the text,

QUESTION 2

The problem of left-handedness

QUESTION 3

We can tell from the text that

QUESTION 4

The word trifling in line 6 means

QUESTION 5

The scientists have concluded that

QUESTION 6

According to the text, hand preference begins to develop

QUESTION 7

The right side of the brain regulates

QUESTION 8

The word exclusively in line 15 is NOT synonymous to

QUESTION 9

The word south-paw in. line 17is used for

QUESTION 10

We may conclude from the text that