Stories, messages and problems
Personal accounts, a workplace email and a forum post: following a story and pinning down who and what is meant.
A2 reading asked you to find a sentence. B1 reading asks you to hold a whole text in your head: who is speaking, what happened in which order, and what the writer actually thinks about it.
Read the text once to the end before you look at the questions. Never stop at the first unknown word.
Three habits do most of the work at this level.
Nachdem …, wurde …, später …
the order of events
the connectors carry the chronology even if you miss a verb
Das hat mir Angst gemacht. → Was ist "das"?
what a pronoun points back to
das, es, sie, dort almost always refer to the sentence before
Trotzdem würde ich es wieder machen.
the writer's own position
trotzdem, meiner Meinung nach and deshalb mark opinion, not fact
And for words you do not know: decide what the sentence needs the word to mean, then move on. A B1 text is written so that most unknown words can be skipped entirely.
Looking up every unknown word as you go.Finishing the paragraph, then checking only the words the questions actually need.
Reading in a second language is mostly deciding what you are allowed not to understand.
Words from this topic
- der der Absatzthe paragraph
- der der Betreffthe subject line
- sich beziehen aufto refer to
- die die Aussagethe statement
- ehrlichhonest