Receptive skills - reading comprehension of authentic written texts
Reading is the second half of Paper 2 (HL: two hours in total for listening plus reading; reading is worth 25% of the final grade). You meet several authentic texts - news articles, opinion columns, interviews, blogs, leaflets, and at HL at least one more literary or abstract text - anchored in the five themes (identities, experiences, human ingenuity, social organisation, sharing the planet). Questions test literal detail, inference, reference, tone and the ability to guess unknown lexis from context. You are not expected to understand every word.
Question types and how to answer them
- Detail/locate: answer with the text's own words, trimmed to the minimum needed.
- True/false with justification: the justification must be the clause that proves the answer; a correct verdict with a wrong or missing justification earns little.
- Reference («¿A qué se refiere esta medida?»): look backwards for the nearest noun phrase that agrees in gender and number.
- Lexical inference: rebuild meaning from word family, prefix, cognate and surrounding syntax; never translate word by word.
- Tone/purpose: notice evaluative adjectives, inverted commas and intensifiers, which carry the writer's stance.
Worked example
Text: «Aunque el ayuntamiento había prometido ampliar el horario, la medida quedó en agua de borrajas.» Question: What happened to the measure? Reasoning: the concessive «aunque» plus the pluperfect «había prometido» set up an unfulfilled promise, so the idiom must mean the plan collapsed. Answer: «No se llevó a cabo» / it never happened. Do not guess the idiom from the literal words agua and borrajas.
Traps that cost marks
- Answering from general knowledge rather than from the text.
- Copying a whole sentence as justification when one clause proves the point.
- False friends: actual (= current), realizar (= to carry out), asistir (= to attend), sensible (= sensitive), éxito (= success).
- Missing hedges and negatives: apenas, salvo, a menos que, ni siquiera, dejar de.
- Leaving blanks - a plausible answer in the right language can still earn partial credit.