How to read an exam passage you only half understand

Nobody sits a reading paper understanding every word. The difference between a pass and a fail is very rarely vocabulary size; it is what you do with the gaps.

Read the questions first

Always. You are not reading for pleasure, you are searching for specific information, and knowing what you are looking for changes how you read. Two minutes on the questions saves five on the passage.

The first and last sentence of every paragraph

Between them they carry most of the structure. Read those first, and you will usually know which paragraph holds each answer before you have read the middle of any of them. Then read closely — but only the paragraph you need.

Unknown words: decide if they matter

When you hit a word you do not know, ask one question: is it load-bearing for the question I am answering? Most are not. A description of the weather in a passage about a job interview can stay a mystery.

If it is load-bearing, work on it in this order:

1. Is it a cognate or a borrowing? Exam texts are full of internationalisms. *Situacija*, *problema*, *rezultatas* — you already know these.
2. What job is it doing? Its ending usually tells you the part of speech, and the words around it tell you the role. A noun in the accusative after a verb is the thing being acted on, whatever it means.
3. Is it built from something you know? Prefixes and suffixes carry a lot: a verb with *ne-* is negative, a noun in *-imas* is usually an action.
4. What would make the sentence make sense? You are allowed to guess. A sensible guess scores exactly the same as certain knowledge.

Negatives and connectors are worth more than nouns

The words that decide a true/false answer are almost never the content words. They are *ne*, *bet*, *tačiau*, *nors*, *todėl*. Miss a negative and you will confidently answer the exact opposite. When you check your work, check those first.

Never leave a blank

There is no penalty for a wrong answer on any of the published sample papers we have seen, and a blank scores zero with certainty. If two minutes remain and three questions are empty, answer all three on instinct. You will get some.

Practising this, not just vocabulary

Take any text slightly above your level. Cover the dictionary. Answer five questions about it. Only then look up the words you did not know — and notice how few of them would have changed your answers. That gap is the skill, and it is trainable separately from vocabulary.