Three Festival Events, One Forty-Five-Minute Shift
Kenta is planning his day at the school festival. Three things matter to him.
• The brass band plays in the gym from 9:30 to 10:15. • The English speech contest runs from 10:00 to 11:00 in Room 201, with five speakers of about ten minutes each; Kenta's friend Daiki is listed fifth. • An international students' cooking demonstration starts at 11:15 in the home-economics room. There are only 20 seats, and tickets go on sale at the office from 8:30 on the day.
Kenta's class runs a café, and his shift is 10:00 to 10:45. He arrives at school at 8:20. His sister is visiting at 12:30, and he has promised to meet her at the gate.
The questions ask what Kenta should do first, whether he can see Daiki speak, and which piece of information is not needed to answer those two questions.
1. What should Kenta do first after arriving at 8:20, and what makes that the priority?
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Buy the cooking-demonstration ticket at the office.
Compare the three constraints. The band starts at 9:30, so there is time. His shift starts at 10:00 and runs to 10:45, so he cannot queue during it. The ticket window opens at 8:30 and there are only 20 seats - this is the only item with both a hard cap and a fixed opening time, and he is standing there ten minutes early.
The general skill: find the item where a resource is limited or a deadline is fixed, and do that one first. Everything else on the schedule can be fitted around it. Buying the ticket at 8:30 also leaves 9:30–10:00 free for the band.
2. Can Kenta see Daiki's speech? Give the time arithmetic and state the honest answer.
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Only part of it, and possibly only the end.
His shift ends at 10:45. The contest runs 10:00–11:00 with five speakers of about ten minutes each, so the fifth speaker cannot begin before roughly 10:40 - and the ten spare minutes in the schedule (50 minutes of speaking inside a 60-minute contest) mean Daiki may start closer to 10:50.
Walking straight from the café to Room 201, Kenta arrives around 10:45–10:47. He will hear the end of Daiki's speech, not all of it. A careful answer says 'part of it' rather than a flat 'yes', and a full-mark answer adds the condition: if he stops to change clothes or help clean up, he misses the speech entirely.
3. Which piece of information in the passage is not needed to answer those two questions, and why is it there?
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The sister arriving at 12:30.
Neither decision depends on it. The ticket is settled by 8:30 and 20 seats; the speech is settled by 10:45 and the speaking order. Nothing about 12:30 changes either answer, so it functions as a distractor.
Notice the nuance, though: it is not useless information. The cooking demonstration runs 11:15–12:00, so the 12:30 visit confirms there is no clash. But 'confirms there is no problem' is different from 'is needed to decide'. Strong readers label extra information as background rather than forcing it into the answer.