PET Reading 2 - 2020

What do you have to do in Part 2?
Matching – In this task you get the descriptions of five people who all want to do,
buy or experience something similar. Match each person to one of eight options.
Part 2 tests you detailed understanding of shorter texts. It is a true reading task
unlike Parts 5 and 6 which test your grammar and/or vocabulary.

Above, you can see a couple of examples from a Reading Part 2 task. The texts are
not very long, but keep in mind that there are a total of five people and eight short
texts so, all together, it is quite a lot to read for you.
You have to match the people with the perfect place for each of them. Remember
that there are always three extra places which you don’t need to use. Also, the place
has to be perfect for the person, which means that the people have to be able to find
everything they want in the place you match them to.
In addition, you have to transfer all your answers onto a separate answer sheet that
you get at the beginning of the test.
What is difficult about Part 2?

Looking at Reading Part 2 we can find a few problems that students sometimes
have. First, I’m going to explain to you what these issues look like and then I’m going
to show you what you can do to avoid the same mistakes.
Be careful with time

Reading Part 2 includes five descriptions of people and eight texts about different
places or activities. That is a total of 13 short texts that you have to read, analyse
and match. If you ask me, that sounds like quite a lot of stuff to do and,
unfortunately, you also don’t have a lot of time.
The whole Reading paper in B1 Preliminary is 45 minutes long and you have to
complete six different tasks. I have told you before that you also have to transfer
your answers onto a separate answer sheet so we can already take five minutes
away for that, which leaves you with around 40 minutes in total or, more or less, 6

1/2 minutes for each task.
You need to be very careful and pay close attention to your timing. If you spend too
much time on one task, that time will be missing for the other ones.
Don’t get distracted
In every Cambridge English exam like B1 Preliminary, B2 First or C1 Advanced you

can find that the people who create the questions and write the tasks often try to
confuse you. The wrong answers are very similar to the correct one or you can find
information connected to all the different possible answers in the same text.
We call these pieces of wrong or confusing information ‘distractors’. You have to
practise the different tasks quite a lot to learn the best techniques to deal with these
distractors effectively.
The people and the texts need to be a perfect match
In Reading Part 2 you have to match five people to eight different texts. While this
might sound quite simple, it can be pretty difficult because, as I mentioned earlier,
distractors might lead you to a wrong answer.
There are usually three things that each person is looking for in their preferred
place and you have to find that perfect one for them. All three things have to be
there in the text for you to make the match.
Tips and strategies for Reading Part 2

Now that you know about the three most common problems in this part of the PET
exam, let’s check how you can avoid these mistakes and what the best strategies are
to be successful and save time.
Read and analyse what the people want
The first thing you should do when you get to Reading Part 2 is to check what exactly
the five different people want from their perfect place. Read each description very
carefully and underline the things that are important to each person.
In our example from before this could look like this:

You can see, in different colours, the three things that are important to Jenny and Matt
when visiting a city market. It is key for you to find these three things for all five people
in order to be able to complete this task. Otherwise, you will have to guess the correct
answers and we definitely don’t want that to happen.
Match the people one by one to their perfect place
After analysing what exactly the five people want in their perfect city market we can now
look at the eight short texts and find out which market is right for each person.
Start with the first text and see if you can find anything that matches what any of the
people want. If you see something, check if this place offers all three things because
remember, it must be a perfect match of all three things.
Repeat this step for the other texts or until you have found the perfect place for all five
people.
In this step you need to be careful with synonyms and paraphrasing. Synonyms are
words that have the same meaning and paraphrasing means to say the same thing using
different words, for example, ‘He doesn’t want to be your boyfriend anymore.’ and ‘ He
wants to break up with you.’ have the same meaning, but I used different words to say
them. You will often find that the words in the descriptions of the people are different
from the words in the descriptions of the places.
Again, let’s look at the example from before:
Here, I’ve underlined the most important information again and you can see that text F
belongs to Jenny while text G matches Matt.
You should also notice that there are a lot of synonyms and paraphrasing. For example,
Jenny wants the market to be close to ‘local attractions’. In text F it says that the market
is ‘[c]lose to museums and art galleries’, which are local attractions.

PET Reading 2 - 2020

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

PET Reading 2 - 2020

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

PET Reading 2 - 2020

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

What do you have to do in Part 2?

What is difficult about Part 2?

Be careful with time

Don’t get distracted

In every Cambridge English exam like B1 Preliminary, B2 First or C1 Advanced you

The people and the texts need to be a perfect match

Tips and strategies for Reading Part 2

Read and analyse what the people want

In our example from before this could look like this:

Match the people one by one to their perfect place

Again, let’s look at the example from before:

You might also like

Pfad - The Proxy pFad of © 2024 Garber Painting. All rights reserved.