What do you have to do in Part 3?

4-option multiple choice​ – In Part 3 of the PET Reading paper you read a longer text 
(see the example below) and answer five question. For each of those questions you 
choose from four options A, B, C or D. 

Part 3 tests your general and detailed understanding of a longer text as well as your 
understanding of the writer’s opinions and attitude. It is a true reading task 
compared to Parts 5 and 6 which test your grammar and vocabulary. 

The text in Part 3 is always a little bit longer with between 300-350 words. In 
addition, you get five questions with four possible answers A-D​. 
  

You can see that the last question looks a different from the others, but I’m going to 
talk about that a little bit later. 

Always remember that you also have to transfer your answers onto a separate 
answer sheet which you get from the examiner at the beginning of the test. 

As you probably know, there are six different parts in the Reading section of the B1 
Preliminary exam. Each part has its own difficulties, but there are also a few general 
things that are interesting for you to know.  

What is difficult about Part 3?

As with all the different sections in the B1 Preliminary Reading test there are also 
some common problems that students experience in Part 3. So first, I’m going to 
point out the issues and then we’re going to look at some possible solutions. 
Don’t get into time trouble

In PET Reading you only get 45 minutes to complete 6 different tasks. Some of these 
tasks, like Part 3, ask you to read pretty long texts and answer questions or fill in 
gaps. In addition, you always have to transfer your answers onto an extra answer 
sheet, which usually takes around five minutes. T ​ hat leaves us with around 40 
minutes to answer all the questions or, more or less, 6 1/2 minutes per task​. 

Obviously, that is not a lot of time and you need to be very careful. ​Always have an 
eye on the clock and make sure that you don’t spend too much time on a single 
task​. 

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. 

Don’t let the last question confuse you

The last question in Reading Part 3 always looks different from the other questions 
and it is very important that you don’t get confused by that. Believe me, there is really 
nothing to worry about if you know what exactly you have to do in this last question. 

Tips and strategies for Reading Part 3

Now that we’ve had a look at the three most common issues that I usually see with 
my students who prepare for B1 Preliminary we can also check what the solutions to 
these problems are, so in this part of my article I’m going to try and give you as much 
useful information as possible. 

Follow a step-by-step process

One of the most crucial things in the exam is that you have a plan for each task so 
you know exactly what you have to do​. This can help you a lot if you are running out 
of time. Instead of getting really nervous and making unnecessary mistakes you can 
take a deep breath, focus on your step-by-step process and keep collecting marks. 

In Reading Part 3 this process looks like this: 

 1. Read questions 11-14 and underline the key words 
2. Quickly read the text and highlight the parts where you can find the answers 
to questions 11-14 
3. Re-read the highlighted parts and choose the correct answer. 
4. Read question 15 and the possible answers carefully and underline key words. 
5. Choose the correct answer for question 15. 

Let me now show you what the first three steps might look like for our example from 
before. After that, we’ll deal with question 15. 

Questions 11-14 follow the order of the text

When you look at the first four questions in Reading Part 3 keep in mind that they 
follow the order of the text, which means that the answer to the first question is 
somewhere at the beginning of the text and the answer to question 14 more towards 
the end. 

 
First of all, you want to look at questions 11-14 and underline the most important words. 
As you can see above, I’ve already done the work for you and now we read the text 
quickly, just to get a general understanding of the topic and what happens in the text. 
While you are reading just highlight the parts that match the questions and where you 
think you can find the correct answers. 

Again, I’ve already highlighted everything for you. The colours show you which part 
belongs to which of the questions. You can see that, indeed, the questions follow the 
order of the text. 

After you’ve done this little bit of preparation you re-read the different parts more 
carefully and choose the correct answer for each question. 

In our example, it looks like this. 

  

 
The underlined parts in the text perfectly match the circled options in the questions. 

Remember, there are three steps to answering questions 11-14 and it is always the 
same process. Practise to get faster and there won’t be a problem for you​. 

How to deal with question 15

Question 15 is a little bit different from the other questions, but if you know how it works, 
it isn’t really a problem. 

As I’ve told you before, all the other questions follow the order of the text and they ask 
you about some detailed information. ​Question 15, however, asks you about the whole 
text. You can’t just look for some detail that gives you the correct answer, but you need 
to understand the main idea(s) and what the author wants to say​. 

In our example the question asks for a good introduction to the article. This means that 
you have to understand what the article talks about in order to make that decision. 

A good way to answer this task is to eliminate the wrong options. They always include 
something that the text doesn’t talk about or they give you false information so it is 
normally quite easy to find the wrong ones​. 

For example, in option A we see that Peter Fuller never says that mountain biking is more 
important to him than his career. Option C describes the relationship between mountain 
biking and Peter’s career as an artist, but in the text he never says that he chose his 
career only because of the sport. And lust but not least, option D says that he gave up art 
to become as good as possible, which is simply not correct. In fact, he gave up racing 
because he was afraid of accidents. 

The only possible answer that is left is option B and when we look at the information, we 
see that it describes the text pretty well. So, don’t be scared of this last question, but be 
careful because it works a little bit differently from the other tasks in Reading Part 3.