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 8Book 3 · Section 1 · 8 / 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 8
READING TEXT
  1. “Robot' really means a workman, not a mechanical monster. It is one of the
  2. very few Slavic words (in this case Czech) borrowed in the English language.
  3. It comes from the Old Slavic word “robu', which means a servant. In Modern
  4. Slavic, the word “robotnik' means workman and is linked to the Russian word
  5. for work, “robot'.
  6. “Robot' came into general use in English only after 1923, following the
  7. great success of a play by a Czech author Karl Capek (1890—1938). Capek's
  8. play was called “R.U.R.' which stood for “Rossum's Universal Robots'. It was
  9. about mechanical automatons that did the work of men, and were efficient but
  10. soulless. In the play, society exploited them, came to depend entirely on
  11. them, and was destroyed by them when they revolted. Since then, the term
  12. “robot' has come to mean a mechanical man, often in recognizable human form,
  13. as well as a non-human-looking machine that does work formerly only handled
  14. by men.
  15. Since the early days of Capek's play, “robot' found its way into the
  16. dictionaries of every modern language, but in its original language there
  17. is no sense of a mechanical man, just of an ordinary worker.
QUESTION 1

According to Paragraph 1, lines 1—5, “robot' means

QUESTION 2

The word “robot' became popular

QUESTION 3

In Capek's play robots were

QUESTION 4

The word entirely in line 10 means c

QUESTION 5

The term “robot' nowadays refers to