How to approach B1 Preliminary Reading Part 2
Today, I’m going to examine the task in B1 Preliminary Reading Part 2.
I’m using the task from the B1 Preliminary for Schools Sample Paper, available to download here.
What’s in this part of the B1 Preliminary exam?
The rubrics
Then, we have five short texts about people and the things they need/would like to do or get.
On the opposite page, we have eight texts with information about places, courses, etc. (related to the needs/wants specified in the rubrics.
In this example, all five people want to do a cycling course.
Each person is looking for 3 things (sometimes even four).
So, what I do is train students to draw a table to fill in. Four columns and 6 rows.
In the first column, they write the names of the five people.
In the next three columns, they write their wants or needs.
Then, students read the eight texts on the second page.
If they find a ‘match’ for things in the table, write the letter of the text (A-H) in the box.
If students write the same letter in all three boxes for a person, then that’s the answer!
Here is the completed table for this sample task:
As you can see, there is quite a lot of distraction – a common testing tool in Cambridge exams. To have a ‘match’, all three requirements must be met.
I talked about this task, and my approach to it, in a webinar for Cambridge. You can watch it on Youtube.
As always, I hope this post is useful to you and your students.
If you would like more advice on B1 Reading tasks, I recommend you read these posts:
Applying real-life reading skills to B1 Preliminary Reading.
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