Interpretive Reading
Interpretive Reading presents authentic German texts - news items, advertisements, forms, instructions, blog posts, reviews, literary excerpts, correspondence - with English multiple-choice items on main idea, detail, inference, vocabulary in context, author's purpose, tone, and text organization. The level runs from Intermediate High to Advanced, so the deciding difficulty is usually lexical precision and correctly reading hedged or hypothetical statements.
Rules that decide items
- Genre first. Headline, layout, bullet points, and salutation tell you the purpose before you finish sentence one; a Leserbrief argues, an Anzeige persuades, a Merkblatt instructs.
- False friends. bekommen = get, Gift = poison, Mist = rubbish, eventuell = possibly, sensibel = sensitive, Handy = mobile phone, Oldtimer = classic car, Chef = boss, also = thus.
- Morphology beats the dictionary. ver-, ent-, zer-, be- and -ung, -heit, -keit, -bar, -los let you infer unfamiliar words from stems.
- Konjunktiv II = hypothesis or politeness. wäre, hätte, würde, könnte - if an item asks what is factually true, exclude these.
- Nominalisation and passive. Es wird empfohlen, … hides the agent; in long noun phrases the head noun comes last (die Einführung der neuen Regelung).
- Cohesion. dabei, zudem, dennoch, damit, deren point backwards; track the referent.
Worked example
Ad copy: "Nur noch diese Woche: Wer bis Freitag bestellt, erhält die Lieferung versandkostenfrei - allerdings nur innerhalb Deutschlands." Item: What is required for free shipping? Reasoning: Wer bis Freitag bestellt plus nur innerhalb Deutschlands gives two conditions in one sentence; allerdings nur restricts and eliminates the "worldwide" option; Nur noch diese Woche limits the offer period but is not a shipping condition, so an option naming only the deadline is incomplete.
Traps
Picking a true-but-unsupported statement; reading a Konjunktiv clause as fact; skimming past nur and allerdings; translating idioms word for word (Da liegt der Hund begraben = that is the crux); letting a cognate override the surrounding context.