READING PART 2

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?

Be careful with time

The whole Reading paper in B1 Preliminary is 45 minutes long and you have to complete six different
tasks. 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.

Don’t get distracted

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 practice 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

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 analyze 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 colors, 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 analyzing 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. 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, look at the underlined 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.