Reading Comprehension: General and Medical Texts
What is tested
Reading tasks use two text families: everyday Bulgarian (appointment confirmations, notices, personal letters, insurance correspondence) and clinical Bulgarian (package leaflets, discharge summaries, informed-consent forms, referral letters, patient-information sheets). The examiner checks whether you can find a specific detail, infer the writer's purpose, and follow the logical links between sentences - not whether you can translate every word.
Concepts to control
- Cohesive connectors: затова (therefore), обаче / но (but), въпреки това (nevertheless), следователно (consequently), тъй като (since), поради (owing to), в случай че (in case).
- Modality: препоръчва се (is recommended), може да (may), не трябва (must not), задължително е (it is mandatory), противопоказан (contraindicated). A single item often turns on the difference between advice and prohibition.
- Impersonal and passive phrasing typical of medical prose: установява се, беше извършен, дозата се намалява.
- Abbreviations and units: мг, мл, ммHg, ЕКГ, НЗОК, ГП (general practitioner).
Traps
- Redundant negation with освен ако and докато не. In „освен ако стойностите не са в норма“ the не does not make the clause negative; the meaning is „unless the values are normal“.
- Scope of не with quantifiers: „не всички пациенти“ (not all patients) versus „всички пациенти не“ (no patients).
- Lexical near-misses: ангина means tonsillitis, not angina; отравяне means poisoning, not recovery.
- Distractors that reuse a word from the text but reverse the relation of cause and consequence.
Worked example
Text: „При пациенти с бъбречна недостатъчност дозата се намалява наполовина, освен ако креатининът не е в норма.“ Question: when is the dose halved? The main clause states the rule; освен ако не introduces the exception and is read affirmatively - unless creatinine is normal. Answer: halve the dose in renal impairment, but not if creatinine is normal. Rule of thumb: after освен ако the не is pleonastic; keep the main clause as written and read the dependent clause as positive.