Multiple Choice (reading)

When it is on the paper, this task is worth 6 points of the twenty for reading. It is not guaranteed to be there: the reading part is put together from whole tasks of four types, and a paper takes only as many as add up to twenty. All you do is put one cross out of four. Guessing is cheap, so everything about the task is built to keep guessing from paying.

One thing is worth knowing before you start. The wrong options are not made of words from outside the text: they take the text's own words and put them together into something the text did not say. The right option, in the official sample, mostly says what the text says in other words: where the text has intimate cabaret-style theaters, the right option says performed to small audiences. Recognising familiar words does not separate the right option from the wrong ones, and the first hour of preparation goes into unlearning the habit.

The text, and one question done for you

This is a training text, not an exam text. The text in the official sample fills a whole page in two columns; this one is a single paragraph. It is short on purpose: while you are working out what the options are made of, a long text is only in the way. What it does not train is keeping the third paragraph in your head while you read the sixth question, and for that you go to the trainer.

Until 2019 the town library in Ostend closed at six. A new director, Ivo Brandt, then kept it open until two in the morning on Thursdays, because the people he wanted to reach worked shifts and could not come earlier. The idea was not his: a librarian in Ghent had tried it, given up after one winter, and written an article explaining why. Brandt read that article and copied everything in it except the closing time. The first month was quiet, and the council asked him for attendance figures. Instead of sending them, he invited the councillors to come at midnight and count for themselves; four of them did. By the second year the late shift was busier than the afternoon, although borrowing barely changed: most visitors were reading in the building, using the printers, or asleep in the armchairs, which the staff had decided not to prevent. Ostend now trains other libraries in the region and charges them a fee, which covers two of its eleven salaries.

The first question on the sheet comes marked for you. That is not our kindness, it is the exam page: it prints a specimen and does not count it.

Look at what is printed to the left of the options. It is not a question: it is the beginning of a sentence, cut off in the middle, and your cross finishes it. You read the whole thing, stem included: The library in Ostend used to close at six in the evening. Your turn now.

The first question

What you just chose between was not true and untrue, it was a reason and a plain truth. That is where the four rules the whole task stands on come from.

The rule and the table

An option finishes a sentence somebody else began. In the official sample not one of the seven stems, the example included, ends in a question mark: what stands on the left is an unfinished sentence. Reading an option apart from its stem is not possible. The stem fixes two things at once: who is being talked about (The libraries that Ostend now trains, According to the ferry company) and what is wanted from the option, a reason, a consequence, a time, an opinion. Many wrong options are true and simply do not answer the stem in front of them.

The slot the stem asks for varies, and the check is the same for all of them: the option against the text, then the option against the stem. Three shapes of the same trap:

One check covers all three rows: not "is it in the text" but "does it stand behind the very word the option answers". Truth on its own settles nothing in any of the three.

Under the right option lies one place in the text. Not a paragraph and not a general impression, but a sentence or two you can put a finger on. Until you have found it, the question is not answered. The test is the same as in true/false: show the line.

An absolute word can overshoot. What overshoots is not the word but the claim: the option says more than the text did. The text says most visitors, the option says all visitors. A quantifier is where you notice it: all, only, never, always, every, none, and with them no one, nothing, nobody, which work the same way. When you see one, go to the place in the text and check whether the text says as much.

But the word is a reason to check and never a verdict, and that cuts both ways. If the text says never as well, the option with never is right, and crossing it out gives the point away. And a word from the list is not always a quantifier: in not at all or after all, all measures nothing, it belongs to an idiom, and the question of overshooting does not arise. One thing decides it: whether the option promises more than the text said.

A cautious word is no verdict either. The opposite habit, always taking the option with some, often, may or many, fails for the same reason. A hedge makes an option sound careful, not correct: many visitors came from Ghent is as cautious as an option gets and still wrong about this text. A cautious word is not a verdict either way: check it in the text.

A wrong option is often half right. The first half is copied from the text, the second half invented. What breaks it is usually the last word, which is why you read an option through to the full stop, exactly as you read the sentence in the text.

That is the rule, and it is tested on the spot, on the same trap, from the second row of the first table this time: the stem asks not for a cause but for who it is about. The question is on the very end of the text; the next one takes you back to the middle. The order of work does not change: check the option against the text, then the option against the stem. The mark is lost at the second step.

Questions 2–5

Three of the four options were true, and the slot was all that told them apart. The next question breaks not at the slot but at where in the text you stop.

Two of the wrong options here borrowed from a different time and a different place, and the third was not in the text at all. In the next question the wrong option parts from the text not over where it stands but over how much it claims.

You checked the size of the claim against the text rather than by feel. In the next question all four options begin identically and only part company at the end of the line.

You checked the tail of the option. The three remaining rules are consolidated further on, on a text you are seeing for the first time.

The last questions, on a different text

Same format, a text you have not seen. On the exam it is new to you as well, and what you know about the library will not help you here.

The ferry to Rossay carries no cars, and never has. When the council proposed a larger boat in 2021, the islanders voted against it, and the vote was not close. Two shops on the island closed the following year. The ferry company says the closures and the vote have nothing to do with each other; the shopkeepers have said nothing, because both of them have since moved away.

You found the place in the text. The next question looks like the absolute-word trap, and a trap like that is worth checking rather than discarding.

You checked the absolute word against the text. The next question is its mirror image: the cautious words sit in the wrong options.

You checked the cautious words too. In the last question the wrong option is copied from the text three quarters of the way, and the part that finishes it is put in the mouth of somebody the text never lets speak.

What to take with you

The order of work that follows: read the stem and work out what it demands; drop the options that do not answer it, before you even open the text; for the ones left, find the place in the text and read it through to the full stop. An empty box is a certain zero, and a guessed cross costs nothing: the official sample paper and its key print no deduction for a wrong answer. The only deduction they print is the word-count table for the blog comment.

True / False + Justification: the other task where the answer has to be pointed at in the text Multiple Matching: there too the wrong option is built out of the text's own words Word choice: what separates not close from close, and why that settles the question