The External Exam's Unfamiliar Text
In the external examination, students respond in Romanian to an unfamiliar written text, then complete a short listening task and a piece of extended writing. Andrei opens the unfamiliar text and meets a dense paragraph about rural depopulation containing several words he does not know: 'despăduri', 'recul', 'gospodărie'. He panics, rereads the paragraph four times, and loses 12 minutes of the 20-minute reading allocation. In the listening task, he understands the gist but misses two specific figures because he was still writing the previous answer when the audio moved on. In the extended writing, he has 25 minutes left and produces 180 words where 250 are expected, with a strong introduction and a rushed, unqualified conclusion.
1. Diagnose Andrei's examination decisions and propose a concrete strategy for the unfamiliar-text section that does not depend on knowing every word.
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Andrei's core error is treating unknown vocabulary as a barrier rather than as information to be managed. 'Despăduri' is morphologically transparent - the prefix 'des-' signals removal, and the root relates to forest - so it can be inferred as deforestation without a dictionary. 'Recul' can often be recovered from context, since a paragraph about rural depopulation will signal decline or setback. 'Gospodărie' is a high-frequency cultural term for a household or smallholding and is likely to recur, so it is worth flagging and revisiting rather than stalling on. His strategy should be: read the questions first to establish what information is needed; skim the whole text once for gist in about three minutes; then read for the specific information the questions demand, marking unknown words lightly and moving on. Morphology, cognates, and sentence position should be used to hypothesise meanings, and hypotheses revised as the text continues. Crucially, he should set a hard time limit per section. Four rereads of one paragraph produced no new understanding and cost him the listening task and half his writing time - the cost of perfectionism here was far higher than the cost of imperfect comprehension.
2. Explain how Andrei should reallocate his time across the three sections, and how the listening and writing outcomes should change as a result.
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He should budget backwards from the total and protect the writing, which carries substantial marks and rewards a complete, well-shaped response. A workable allocation is roughly 20 minutes on the unfamiliar text with a hard stop, the listening section following the audio's own pacing with answers written immediately in note form and expanded later, and at least 30 minutes for the extended writing including 3 minutes of planning and 3 of checking. In listening, the fix is procedural: write abbreviated answers as the audio plays and never let a missed item block the next, since the recording advances regardless. Missing two figures is recoverable if the surrounding answers are captured; stopping to complete one answer is not. In writing, the 180-word response shows he wrote well but ran out of runway. With protected time he should plan the structure first - introduction, two developed arguments, a counterpoint, a qualified conclusion - so that even if he must compress, the compression falls on examples rather than on the conclusion. An unqualified conclusion is exactly where rushed candidates lose analysis marks.