What is difficult about Part 2?

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.

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.

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

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:

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.

General tips

First of all, try to read things in English as often as possible. Even if you only have five or ten
minutes every day on the bus to or from work or school, use it practise some reading. Read
whatever you want: the news, stories, articles or anything else you enjoy.

You will become a faster reader, which can save you time in the test, and you will see a lot of
grammatical structures and new vocabulary that you might see again when you take the exam.