Read arguments about being reachable without assuming that a writer must either welcome every interruption or reject cooperation. Track what is being evaluated, whose view is reported, and how the strength of a conclusion changes across the text.
A text may mention phones, timetables or working hours while making a point about expectations. Ask what judgement the writer wants the reader to reconsider. Describing a useful tool does not necessarily endorse every practice associated with it.
An opening concession can give credit to a benefit before identifying a cost. Preserve both parts: an answer that turns a qualified criticism into total rejection changes the position.
| Relationship | Reading question |
|---|---|
| Concession | What is accepted before the reservation is introduced? |
| Qualification | Which condition, limit or exception narrows the claim? |
| Revision | What earlier judgement is changed by later experience? |
| Contrast | Which two measures, interpretations or arrangements differ? |
| Illustration | What general point does this particular event help explain? |
Do not identify a paragraph’s function from one connecting word alone. Check what the paragraph adds to the argument before and after it.
A writer can report a supervisor’s judgement without agreeing with it. Phrases such as she took this to mean, to me and I had assumed identify whose interpretation you are reading and whether it belongs to an earlier stage.
Distinguish a person’s motive from an effect. A sender may intend convenience while a recipient experiences pressure. One does not automatically establish the other.
Words such as this, that judgement or such a result can point to a whole proposition. Restate the idea they refer to, then read the following sentence to check that the relationship still makes sense.
A figurative phrase should be interpreted in its argument. Avoid a literal reading when the surrounding passage concerns a social expectation rather than a physical action.
A quotation can be true and relevant without directly expressing the relationship a question requires. A sentence describing a timetable does not by itself state that somebody accepted it only under a particular condition.
“I agreed to the new schedule once there was a named person to handle requests during my absence.”
This directly gives a condition of agreement. It does not establish that the arrangement worked, that everyone supported it or that the writer refused every other schedule.
In Exercises 2, every option is an exact sentence from the extract. Choose the one that directly supplies all parts of the stated claim. Other sentences remain true; they answer different questions.
Favourable evidence from a local trial may justify continuing the trial without proving a universal rule. A reservation about staffing can qualify support for an aim without rejecting that aim.
Check modal verbs, conditions and limits. Could help is not will solve; not by itself does not mean never relevant. A main-idea answer should preserve the writer’s final balance, rather than repeat only the strongest criticism.
C1 Advanced Reading and Use of English Part 5 has a text followed by six questions, each with four options. It tests detail, opinion, tone, purpose, main idea, implication and attitude.
Cambridge English exam format reference. The practice texts in this lesson are original fictional accounts.
Exercises 1: trace the argument in a complete newsletter-group account (8 questions). Exercises 2: choose a sentence that directly establishes a specified relationship in each of six independent extracts (6 questions). Exercises 3: complete six Part 5-style questions on a separate festival-information account (6 questions).
Answer every question in a block before selecting Check answers. Explanations give exact quotations and paragraph references, and explain why each alternative does not satisfy its question. Try again resets that block and shuffles its answer cards.
Read the complete account and follow how the writer develops and qualifies the argument. Choose one answer for each of the 8 questions.
Complete all 8 answers before selecting Check answers. You can refer to the text throughout. Click any part of an answer card.
An original fictional account.
Paragraph P1The messaging group for our neighbourhood newsletter was useful from the start. A photograph could reach the designer without a separate journey; a missing name could be checked before an article went to print. I would not exchange that convenience for a rule requiring every small question to wait for the next meeting. Yet the ease of sending messages concealed another question: when had sending something come to count as making a claim on somebody else's immediate attention? The tool solved the problem of distance without settling the meaning of availability.
Paragraph P2Our editor often wrote, 'There is no need to answer tonight.' I believed her. Even so, the names of those who replied within minutes became familiar, and their promptness attracted appreciative comments at meetings. Nobody announced a competition. The comparison emerged through repeated small acts of recognition. A volunteer could sincerely be released from an obligation by the sender and still feel the pull of a group in which fast replies were noticed. Reading the editor's words alone therefore gave an incomplete account of the pressure.
Paragraph P3I began checking messages between almost every stage of editing an article. Most did not require a decision from me. Nevertheless, each check broke the thread of what I was doing, and I sometimes resumed at the wrong point. We counted how quickly a question received a reply, but not how often a volunteer had to reconstruct an interrupted line of thought. That contrast matters. The benefit was easy to display because a timestamp made it visible; the cost occurred inside work whose progress the group did not record. The absence of a figure did not make the cost imaginary.
Paragraph P4It would be convenient to blame all this on senders who failed to respect other people's evenings. Some messages, however, were sent late precisely because that was when the writer had a free moment. Delaying the act of sending until everyone else was available would have reduced those volunteers' chance to contribute. What we needed to reconsider was not simply the hour at which a message appeared, but the inference a reader was expected to draw from its arrival. Sending and requiring an immediate response had become unnecessarily difficult to separate.
Paragraph P5At one meeting a contributor suggested that each person simply ignore the group whenever they wished. That sounded generous, but it left the same uncertainty with every individual: would a delayed answer be taken as indifference? A private choice was not equivalent to a shared expectation. We eventually agreed to mark the rare time-sensitive request clearly and to treat other messages as available for the next agreed checking period. The arrangement gave a delayed reply a meaning that did not have to be negotiated afresh by the person delaying it.
Paragraph P6The rule did not make judgement unnecessary. A cancelled interview on publication day could justify contacting a colleague directly; a request for next month's photograph usually could not. Nor could the label 'urgent' become a way of giving every preference priority. We agreed that a request marked that way should identify the approaching deadline and the consequence of waiting. The point was to keep a route for genuine interruption while making its use accountable. Protecting attention meant distinguishing kinds of request, not declaring that other people could never need us.
Paragraph P7After a month, routine replies took longer. On the old measure that would have looked like deterioration. Articles, however, reached the designer with fewer corrections that could have been avoided by reading them through without interruption. This did not prove that slower replies always improve writing, or that our arrangement would suit every group. It gave us reason to judge this particular change by more than response time. The experiment had altered one visible quantity while improving a part of the work we had previously left out of view.
Paragraph P8I still appreciate being able to contact somebody easily, and I do not imagine attention as property that must never be shared. Cooperation involves requests and occasional interruptions. But it also depends on giving people conditions in which they can do what they have agreed to do. Availability is useful when its terms are understood; it becomes costly when silence must continually be defended. Our small revision did not remove responsibility to one another. It made that responsibility less dependent on a performance of constant readiness.
Read each complete extract. Every option is a sentence from that extract. Choose the sentence that directly establishes the relationship specified in the question. There are 6 questions.
Complete all 6 answers before selecting Check answers. You can refer to the text throughout. Click any part of an answer card.
Read the complete text and answer questions 1–6. For each question, choose the answer supported by the text. Suggested practice time: 15 minutes; this is a practice target, not a separate official exam time limit.
Complete all 6 answers before selecting Check answers. You can refer to the text throughout. Click any part of an answer card.
A writer reconsiders how to assess a festival’s information service. An original fictional account.
Paragraph R1When I was asked to write about the information service at our town's weekend festival, I expected to celebrate the people who made themselves endlessly available. In previous years, visitors had been given the private mobile numbers of two experienced organisers. Someone always seemed to know whom to call, even after the official desk had closed. This year the service had a duty phone and a rota instead. I imagined that such arrangements would be useful but rather bloodless, and that the real story would still be the generous person willing to answer beyond the agreed hours.
Paragraph R2My first enquiry did little to challenge that picture. I sent a message to the duty phone about a programme correction one evening and received a reply the next morning. Nothing depended on getting an answer that night, but I found the delay irritating. The organiser, Lidia, told me that enquiries went to whoever was on duty, rather than following her home. Her private phone was no longer the festival's unofficial second desk. I had treated an unanswered phone as a gap in the service, although the published hours promised no service then. The phone could tell me no such thing on its own.
Paragraph R3Nora, one of the organisers whose number people remembered, understood my reaction. She had enjoyed being the familiar voice who could untangle a visitor's problem. She did not describe every evening call as an intrusion, and I would have misrepresented her by doing so. But remembering her helpfulness was different from knowing whether the festival had arranged for anybody to be available. A caller might find her free, or catch her on the way to something she could not miss. 'People knew me,' she said, 'which wasn't quite the same as knowing what they could count on.'
Paragraph R4On Saturday I spent an hour beside the desk. For a time there were no enquiries, and I noted that a volunteer was being kept there unnecessarily. Then a visitor explained that she had checked the opening-hours board earlier and returned when she knew someone would be there to clarify an altered walking route. The quiet period no longer seemed evidence of a pointless role. Staffing the desk created a dependable place to ask; its value did not begin only at the instant a queue appeared. I crossed out the word 'unnecessarily', without deciding that every quiet hour would justify any level of staffing.
Paragraph R5Later, a performer rang to say that the entrance to her venue had become inaccessible. The volunteer on duty contacted the site coordinator, recorded the temporary entrance and passed it to the next desk volunteer. Nobody needed to reach Nora at home to reconstruct what had happened. The incident did not show that interruptions had disappeared. It showed that a real interruption could reach someone whose current role included responding, and that information could survive the end of that person's shift. The response rested on an arrangement, rather than on luck about a particular organiser's free time.
Paragraph R6There were weaknesses. The last desk hour on Sunday still had no confirmed volunteer, and I asked whether Lidia would simply cover it herself. She said that her own willingness was not a staffing plan. Reducing the advertised hours or funding cover were options the committee still had to decide between. That unresolved choice deserved space in my article. It prevented the new rota from becoming a tidy story in which writing a boundary solved the work of providing a service. Someone had to cover the hours that were promised, and repeated goodwill could conceal the fact that no such provision had been made.
Paragraph R7I left with a different article from the one I had intended. I still wanted to mention the warmth of Nora's conversations; organisation need not make that warmth irrelevant. But I could no longer use her willingness to answer at any time as the test of the festival's reliability. The better question was whether a visitor could reach a responsible person when contact had been promised, without that promise quietly expanding into somebody's whole life. The rota was an improvement worth examining, not a complete answer worth applauding and leaving alone. Its limits made the story less convenient to write and more useful to tell.