Professional English, Standards and Regulations
The English section is a reading-comprehension task in technical register, and the standards/regulations portion asks you to attribute a number or obligation to the right body or law. Both reward precise recall over general fluency.
Reading technical English
- Parse long sentences by locating the subject and the finite verb; subordinate clauses usually follow relative pronouns (which, that) or participles.
- Watch modal verbs: shall/must create requirements, should is a recommendation, may is optional. Questions often ask what is mandatory.
- Typical vocabulary: bandwidth, throughput, latency, jitter, encapsulation, fragmentation, convergence, redundancy, handshake, broadcast storm, failover, baseline.
- Read numbers carefully - MTU, hop limits, timer values and port numbers are frequently the answer key.
Standards and their owners
- ISO/IEC: OSI reference model (ISO/IEC 7498), X.509 certificates jointly with ITU-T.
- IEEE 802: 802.3 Ethernet, 802.11 WLAN, 802.1Q VLAN, 802.1D STP, 802.1X port authentication, 802.3af/at/bt PoE.
- IETF RFCs: 791 IPv4, 793 TCP, 768 UDP, 826 ARP, 1918 private addressing, 8200 IPv6, 2131 DHCP.
- ITU-T: X series for data networks, G series for transmission. TIA/EIA-568 defines commercial building cabling; ISO/IEC 11801 is its international counterpart.
- China: GB/T and YD series; GB/T 22239-2019 is the classified protection baseline (Level Protection 2.0).
Laws and professional conduct
- Cybersecurity Law (2017): network operators must protect personal information, keep logs, and support lawful supervision.
- Data Security Law (2021) and Personal Information Protection Law (2021): data classification, minimum-necessary collection, explicit consent, cross-border transfer rules.
- Cryptography Law (2020): commercial cryptography is encouraged; core and common cryptography are managed by the state.
- Intellectual property: copyright arises automatically on creation; invention patents in China run 20 years, utility models 10 years, designs 15 years, all from the filing date.
Worked example
Read: "The router shall fragment any packet whose size exceeds the MTU of the egress interface, unless the Don't Fragment flag is set, in which case it shall return an ICMP destination-unreachable message." The obligation is two-part: fragment by default; if DF is set, discard and signal with ICMP type 3 (code 4, fragmentation needed). A question asking what happens with DF set expects the ICMP message, not fragmentation.
Traps that cost marks
- Attributing RFC 1918 to IEEE or 802.1Q to IETF.
- Mixing patent terms (invention 20 years, utility model 10, design 15).
- Reading "should" as a mandatory requirement in a standard.
- Confusing the Cybersecurity Law with the Personal Information Protection Law's consent rules.