B1 Reading oefenexamen simulator

What the Reading exam asks of you

Six real Dutch texts (work, study, everyday life) with comprehension, opinion and purpose questions. Text 6 is a scan-and-search task, not a read-in-full one. Mostly 3 options, some 4. At B1 you get 35 questions in 110 minutes. The Staatsexamen NT2 passes at a scaled score of 500, set per sitting rather than a fixed percentage. The most recently published cesuur (lowest passing raw score) for this part was 24 out of 35. Every paper above runs that whole section end to end under its real time limit, so the first time you meet the pressure is not the day it counts.

What comes up

• Workplace & career situations
• Study & education
• Opinion & argument pieces
• Instructions & regulations
• General-interest & society
• Everyday practical texts

Three things that save marks

• Skim the questions for a text before reading it in full, except text 6, which you're meant to search, not read start to finish.
• The last question of a text is almost always "Wat is het doel van deze tekst?" Know the difference between informing, persuading, describing and instructing.
• Watch for reversed cause-and-effect and 'true but irrelevant' options. B1 distractors test precision, not vocabulary.