Reading a Rental Contract Under Time Pressure
A B2 candidate faces a reading text: a two-page German apartment rental contract excerpt with a "Staffelmiete" clause and a "Kündigungsfrist" of three months. The task asks whether the tenant may end the lease after 18 months and whether the rent can rise in year two. The candidate reads quickly, sees "drei Monate" and "Mieterhöhung", and marks both answers as yes. He has 12 minutes left for two more texts. The contract also states the first rent increase is excluded for 12 months and that the notice period is extended to six months after five years. The candidate did not read the sub-clauses. He is confident but wrong on the notice question.
1. Diagnose the reading error and name the skill the candidate lacked.
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He matched keywords without parsing conditions. "Kündigungsfrist" of three months applies, but the text adds a graded extension after five years; at 18 months the three-month rule holds, so the answer depends on which clause governs. The skill is reading for qualification and scope: identifying when a general rule has exceptions and reading the sentence to its end. Strategy: underline modal and temporal markers ("nach fünf Jahren", "erstmals", "jedoch"), and restate the clause in his own words before answering. Keyword spotting is a B1 habit; B2 tasks reward clause-level logic.
2. How should he allocate the remaining 12 minutes without sacrificing accuracy?
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He should triage: answer the two shorter texts first at a steady pace, then return to the contract only if time remains. For each item, he should locate the exact sentence, read the full sentence plus one before and after, and eliminate options that overgeneralise ("always", "immediately"). A realistic budget is 4 minutes per text plus 2 minutes buffer. Guessing from keywords under time pressure produces confident errors, which are worse than acknowledged uncertainty.