Reading and Responding: Skimming, Scanning and Interpreting Chinese Texts
What this domain tests
Reading and Responding asks you to understand written Chinese across genres: notices, letters, news reports, opinion pieces, short stories and advertisements. You must extract main ideas, supporting detail, sequence and cause-effect, writer's purpose and tone, and implied meaning. Higher marks come from reading the text as a whole rather than translating sentence by sentence.
Concepts to master
- Text organisation: topic sentences, paragraph linking (不仅…而且, 一方面…另一方面, 总之), and conclusions.
- Cohesion: pronoun and ellipsis reference (这, 那, 其, 该) - you must trace what a pronoun points back to.
- Genre conventions: a 通知 opens with audience and purpose; a 投诉信 signals dissatisfaction; a news lead answers who/what/when/where.
- Vocabulary in context: characters with multiple meanings, e.g. 打 in 打电话, 打折, 打招呼; 意思 in 有意思, 不好意思, 小意思.
- Tone indicators: 竟然, 居然, 难免, 未必, 何尝.
Traps to expect
- Plausible but unsupported options - true in real life, absent from the text.
- Over-literal translation of idioms (画蛇添足, 塞翁失马) that changes the intended point.
- Pronoun-reference questions where the nearest noun is not the referent.
- Tone/attitude items where a neutral statement is misread as criticism.
Worked example
Text: 这家店虽然位置偏僻，价格也不便宜，但每天仍然顾客盈门。 Question: 作者对这家店的看法是什么？ The structure 虽然…但… places emphasis on the 但 clause: despite drawbacks, it succeeds. The best answer notes the writer's positive or admiring stance toward its popularity, not a complaint about price. Rule of thumb: read the clause after 但/然而/不过 as the writer's real emphasis.