B1 Reading exam

Six texts, 35 questions, 110 minutes. Each text carries between five and seven questions, never fewer than five, so you are working with a text for a long stretch before you move on. Most questions give you three options; a small number give four, and both shapes appear in the same paper. Every answer is a choice: you never write a word and you never translate.

The delivery is the part that surprises people. The texts are not on the screen. They come in a separate tekst- en opgavenboekje that you download and print before the exam starts, and the screen shows only the question, introduced by a pointer line: Deze vraag hoort bij de tekst 'Ruud wordt rij-instructeur'. Beantwoord de vraag. So you are reading on paper and answering on a screen, moving between the two thirty-five times.

A Van Dale Pocketwoordenboek NT2 is permitted. This is a real difference from the A2 inburgeringsexamen, where no dictionary is allowed, and it changes what preparation is worth doing: at B1 the bottleneck is rarely a single unknown word you could have looked up, it is following an argument across four paragraphs.

Our tip, not a DUO rulePrinting the booklet is not a formality. The exam expects you to work on paper, and candidates who have only ever practised on a screen lose time learning that on the day. Practising with a printed text is our advice, not a CvTE rule.

Texts one to five run from roughly 340 to 1,230 words, with a median around 700. They are multi-section pieces: an italic line at the top says where the text came from (Deze tekst komt van een website over gezondheid, Deze tekst komt uit een studieboek voor opleidingen tot verkoper in een kledingwinkel), and then four to six bold subheadings break the body into parts. Some carry a photo with a caption. You read these properly, start to finish.

The sixth text is a scan text, and the instruction page says so outright: for the last text you read the question first and then look for the answer in the text. It is the longest thing in the paper, between roughly 1,165 and 1,721 words, and it is almost always a set of regulations, terms and conditions, or a college's general-information page. Its questions are lookups with a person attached: Lara volgt een opleiding secretaresse bij Rosarius Opleidingen. Ze wil het examen maken. Wanneer kan dat?

Across a whole paper you are reading somewhere between 4,450 and 6,195 words. That is the number worth internalising, because it is what 110 minutes actually has to cover. The subject matter is adult and real: work, study, and a smaller share of general-interest topics: overtime rules, a neighbourhood WhatsApp group, professional selling technique.

Roughly a third are detail and lookup. The other two thirds are the ones that make this a B1 exam: stance, purpose, main idea, and the relations between parts of a text. Real stems from the published exams read like this. Wat vindt Ruud van medische onderzoeken in de bouwsector? Wat wil Ruud duidelijk maken met het voorbeeld van zijn collega van 35 jaar? Wat is het verschil tussen dieren en mensen als het om huilen gaat? Welke zin vat de mening van de schrijver het beste samen?

One pattern is worth knowing in advance: the last question about a text is very often Wat is het doel van deze tekst? (what is this text for). Its options are infinitive phrases describing what the writer was trying to do: de lezer enthousiast maken over omscholing door een voorbeeld te geven, de lezer laten beseffen dat…, de lezer uitleggen dat…. If you notice you are at the end of a text's question block, expect it.

What makes these texts B1 rather than A2 is not vocabulary lists. It is length and structure you have to keep track of, abstraction (opinions, conditions, consequences, exceptions rather than facts you can point at), and cohesion: reference chains like dat, dit, hiervoor, daarmee, and connectors like hoewel, terwijl, echter, bovendien, daarentegen, mits and tenzij. Those little words carry the argument, and missing one reverses a sentence.

Six shapes repeat. True but irrelevant: a genuine fact from the text that answers a question nobody asked. Right idea, wrong scope: true of one section, offered as true of the whole text. Overstated: the text hedges with vaak, meestal or kan, and the distractor turns it into always. Reversed relation: cause and effect, or condition and consequence, swapped. Plausible world knowledge: true in general, but not stated in this text. And the one that is distinctively B1: only-A, only-B, or both.

That last shape deserves attention. Where a text gives two causes for something, the options will offer each cause alone and then the conjunction of the two: alleen door hormonen, alleen door traanbuizen, zowel … als …. The correct answer is usually the conjunction, and the trap is that you find one cause, recognise it, and stop reading.

The practical consequence is the same as at A2 but sharper: finding your answer in the text is not evidence that it is right. At B1 the test is narrower still, because the question is often about a stance rather than a fact. Ask whether the option matches what this writer or this named person claims, at the scope the question set.

One hundred and ten minutes for 35 questions is a little over three minutes each, which sounds generous until you remember you are also reading five full texts and scanning a sixth. Most of the time goes into reading, not answering, so the pacing decision is really about which texts you read in full and which you hunt in.

The player gives you a mark-for-review flag and an OVERZICHT grid showing all 35 numbers as Onbeantwoord, Beantwoord or Gemarkeerd, with the INLEVEREN button. Use the flag. Nothing should be left blank at the end (there is no penalty for a wrong answer), and the grid is what tells you at a glance whether anything is still empty.

The score is not a percentage. Raw marks are converted to a scaled score where 500 is the pass, and the most recent published cesuur for Lezen I was 24 out of 35. The curve is steep at the ends and nearly straight in the middle, which means a single question near the cut is worth roughly four or five scaled points. That is why finishing matters more than perfecting any one answer.

Our tip, not a DUO ruleThe advice to flag and move on after a couple of minutes is ours, not CvTE's. The exam publishes the total time and nothing about how to spend it.

Uit een tekst over huilen: “Lange tijd dachten onderzoekers dat alleen de traanbuizen bepalen hoeveel iemand huilt. Inmiddels weten we dat ook hormonen een rol spelen. Vrouwen hebben meer prolactine dan mannen, en prolactine maakt huilen makkelijker. Daar komt bij dat vrouwen gemiddeld kleinere traanbuizen hebben, waardoor tranen sneller over de rand lopen.” Vraag: Waarom huilen vrouwen meer dan mannen, volgens de tekst?

From a text about crying: “For a long time researchers thought that only the tear ducts determined how much someone cries. We now know that hormones play a part too. Women have more prolactin than men, and prolactin makes crying easier. On top of that, women have smaller tear ducts on average, so tears run over the edge sooner.” Question: Why do women cry more than men, according to the text?