Read in Daily Life: Short Practical Texts
What you are reading
These are short, everyday documents: an email between colleagues, a building notice, a course schedule, an advertisement, a menu, a web page, or a text-message thread. Passages run a few sentences to about a paragraph, and each carries two to four questions.
The questions that appear
- Purpose: why was this written? (to request, to remind, to advertise, to correct, to apologise)
- Detail: a specific fact - a time, a price, a name, a condition.
- Inference: what the reader can conclude, usually about what the reader should do next or how the writer feels.
- Vocabulary in context: what a word or phrase means as used here.
- Audience or tone: who is being addressed, and how formally.
Strategy
Spend the first fifteen seconds identifying three things: the text type, the relationship between writer and reader (manager to staff, shop to customer, friend to friend), and the purpose. Tone and vocabulary options usually resolve themselves once the relationship is clear.
Traps
- True but irrelevant. An option can restate something the text really says yet fail to answer the question asked. Always re-read the question stem before choosing.
- Echo words. The wrong answers often repeat the text's wording while distorting its logic; the right answer is usually a paraphrase.
- Reason versus purpose. If a writer mentions a rescheduled meeting, the mention may be the reason for writing, not the purpose, which may be to collect replies.
- Date and number arithmetic. Deadlines in schedules are frequently one step removed from the date stated.
- Negative stems. Circle NOT or EXCEPT mentally, so you do not pick the one true option out of three false ones.
Worked example
An email reads: "Because Thursday's training has moved to the 14th, please send me your availability by Monday the 9th." Asked why the writer is writing, the answer is to request information by a deadline - not to announce the new date, which is background. Rule of thumb: the purpose is the action the reader is meant to take.