Multiple Matching

If this task is on your paper, it is worth 10 points of the twenty for reading, as much as true/false; reading multiple choice carries 6. No reading task is certain to appear: the sample reading paper is a catalogue of four tasks worth 34 points together, and a live paper takes whole tasks adding up to exactly 20. The work looks simple enough: under each statement, put a cross in the column of the person it is about.

The obvious move is to hunt for shared words: surely the statement and the right text will have some in common. That is exactly the move this task is built to defeat, and the rows below show how.

The texts, and one statement done for you

These are training texts, not exam texts. On the exam the three texts are several times as long as the ones below. They are short here on purpose: while you are working out what a statement hooks onto, length is only in the way. What a short text does not train is holding on to what the first person said while you read the third, and for that you go to the trainer.

A: Nadia. I took over my mother's shoe-repair shop when she retired. I had trained as a nurse and never expected to be here. The machines are older than I am and I kept every one of them. What I changed was the hours: we open at seven now, before people leave for work, and close at three. Takings are the same as in her last year, and I finish in daylight. I would never return to her evening hours.

B: Ruben. My father's bakery stood empty for two years before I reopened it. Until then I worked at a bank, and the bank paid for the accounting course I took, which turned out to be the useful part. I kept nothing of the old shop but the name over the door: new ovens, new bread, new prices. Older customers tell me it is not what it was, and most of the queue is now under thirty.

C: Wen. The print shop was my uncle's, and I have run it since I was nineteen, which is already longer than he did. Nothing here has been changed on purpose. Machines break and get replaced, so none of the original ones are left, but I never decided that. My hours are his hours, and the shop brings in about what it did in his day. What is different is who comes through the door: students, not offices.

Row 0 on the sheet comes marked for you. That is the exam page doing it, not our kindness.

Neither plan nor business appears anywhere in Nadia's text. What is there is I had trained as a nurse and never expected to be here, which is the same thing said in other words. Every statement is built like that.

The first statement

One word turned up in two texts at once, and it was not the word that made the choice. Hence the rules the whole task rests on.

The rule and the table

A statement is a paraphrase, not a quotation. The exam writes it in the words the right text does not use: previous employer for bank, in charge for run. A word the statement does share with a text proves nothing on its own, because it can just as well sit in a text that does not fit.

There are more crosses than people. Ten rows, three people, so somebody carries several, and the same person can answer rows that follow each other. The instructions do not promise every person a row, so an empty column is not an error in itself. It is a signal to reread the rows you hesitated on, and to move a cross only where a text supports the move.

The whole statement has to hold. A long row often carries two conditions at once: sees a different kind of customer is one, though nothing about the place was done differently is the other. A text that carries the first half and not the second does not fit.

Two people fit down to one detail. A common build of a row is two texts saying the same thing, with a single detail that separates them: who decided something and who had it happen to them, who worked in an office and who trained as a nurse. That detail is what you look for, instead of weighing up who fits better.

Next come four rows in a row, with no discussion between them: in the exam you go down the list, you do not treat each row as a separate task. The discussion comes after all four.

Statements 2–5, in one pass

Four crosses placed, and three times it was not similarity that decided but a single detail. The last three rows go the same way, in one pass, and at the end comes the check you finish the task with.

The last three rows and the check

What to take with you

The order of work that follows from this: read the row, not the text, and decide for each row what it demands; when two people fit, look for the detail that separates them rather than picking the one who resembles it more; at the end, look down the columns, and if one is empty, reread the rows you hesitated on. An empty box is a guaranteed zero, and the official sample paper and its key print no deduction for a wrong answer: the only deduction table in the paper is for the length of the blog comment.

Multiple Choice: there too the wrong option is built out of the text's own words Word choice: recognising your own statement when somebody else's words tell it True / False + Justification: the other ten-point reading task