Matching a heading to a paragraph that repeats one keyword
A reading passage of about 400 words describes how a small town organised a volunteer clean-up of a river. Paragraph 3 reads, in substance: the municipality bought gloves and bags, but almost nobody came on the first Saturday; the organisers then asked the local football club and the school to advertise the event, and attendance tripled the following week. The candidate must choose a heading for paragraph 3 from five options. Two options are: (A) "Финансиране на екологични проекти" and (B) "Как рекламата промени резултата". The candidate picks A because the paragraph mentions buying gloves and bags, and "buying" feels like funding. He spends four minutes on this one item.
1. Which heading is correct and why is the distractor attractive but wrong?
Read the worked answer
Correct heading: B (how advertising changed the result).
The paragraph's main line of thought is: low turnout → recruitment through the football club and school → turnout tripled. The purchase of gloves and bags is a supporting detail in a subordinate clause, not the paragraph's point. Heading A is attractive because it reuses the semantic field of the word "bought", and candidates often match a heading to a single familiar word rather than to the paragraph's function.
A reliable check: cover the paragraph and state its point in one sentence of your own. If your sentence is "they bought equipment", you have summarised a detail. If it is "advertising fixed the turnout problem", you have the heading. Also test the heading against the whole paragraph - A would require the paragraph to discuss money, budget or funding sources, and it does not.
2. The candidate lost four minutes on this item in a 35-minute paper with 20 items. What timing rule should he adopt, and how does it interact with heading-matching items specifically?
Read the worked answer
Rule: about 1.5 minutes per item on average, and never more than 2.5 minutes on one item - mark it and return later.
Reasoning:
- 35 minutes for 20 items leaves roughly 1.75 minutes each, minus reading the passage. Four minutes on one item is more than double the budget and was spent, moreover, defending a wrong answer.
- Heading-matching items are especially prone to over-investment because all five options are plausible-sounding and the candidate keeps re-reading hoping for certainty. Re-reading the same paragraph rarely resolves it; the information needed is already there.
The practical routine: on first pass, answer everything you can and put a dot beside uncertain items. On the second pass, apply the one-sentence summary test to the dotted items only. If the test still does not decide it, choose the option that matches the paragraph's function (problem → solution, cause → effect) rather than the option that repeats a word from the text.