Reading practice – Level 1

1 Read the magazine article. Check (✓) the two correct statements.
a The author is a teenager writing for a teenage audience.
b The author is an older person writing for readers aged 21 or more.
c The author’s main argument is that teenagers should try harder to behave better.
d The author’s main argument is that adults should make the effort to understand teenagers. 

2 Read the article again. Match sentences a–e with blanks 1–5 in the article.
a It can be the time of our lives.
b This is the worst of all possible approaches!
c They tell us how they hardly had any money.
d This changes the way we think and act.
e For others, it is a time of uncontrollable mood swings.

Reflect
3 In the article, it says that teenagers “worry about fitting in, or standing out, or being cool.”
Read the advice to teenagers below. Then choose the five most important and put them in
order from the most important (1) to the least important (5).
Wear what you want. Take chances with fashion.
Do what you want. Don’t worry if your hobby is uncool.
Let your inner self speak – whether it’s through music, art, science, sport, or origami!
Have patience with people who are different from you.
Try to be friends with everybody.
Don’t change just because someone else thinks you should.
Know that even though you may be different to others, there is always some place you are
welcome in the world.
Don’t be afraid to look different.
Speak up even if your opinion is not the same as other people.
Send out positive energy to people.
Don’t worry about being popular with everybody.

3 © Oxford University Press PHOTOCOPIABLE

 Reading practice – Level 1

It Isn’t Easy Being a Teenager

Older people are always telling teenagers how easy
their lives are nowadays. They tell us how they used
to work harder. 1 What they don’t always show,
however, is real empathy with how difficult it is to be a
teen nowadays. Studies show that the teenage years are
not easy to live through. It is about time everybody else
understood this, and stopped criticizing us.
People used to think that the human brain was fully
formed by the time we reached our late teens. We now
know that is not the case. New scanning systems, which
monitor brain activity in young people, have found that
our brains undergo a massive restructuring between the ages of twelve and twenty-
five. 2 As teenagers, we are more likely to take risks, or do things without
thinking. We can be stubborn and rebellious, and we stop listening to our parents.
We worry about fitting in, or standing out, or being cool. And it is not our fault. It is
the way our brains work.
Even for ourselves, it is really hard to get used to being who we are. For many
teenagers, it is a time of self-doubt and anxiety. We become obsessed with our
appearance. We think that everybody is criticizing us. Peer pressure makes us do
things we don’t want to do. 3 One minute we feel positive about life and
the next minute we feel negative. It is important that older people have some
understanding of this.
One problem that parents have is that they are used to treating us like children.
They want to give us rules or tell us off. 4 Teenagers hate being patronized by
their parents; they want to be listened to, not told off. To
be fair to parents, it is incredibly difficult to be patient with
a teenager who is always challenging their authority, but it
is their responsibility to listen to us and understand us.
Of course, we should all remember that there are some
great things about being a teenager. 5 However, it is
also, undoubtedly, a challenging time of great changes.
It is up to us to recognize and understand our changing
behavior, and up to those who love us to be supportive
and encouraging.

3 © Oxford University Press PHOTOCOPIABLE