B2 Reading

Read an editorial to the end and try to state the author's position in one sentence. If it is a good editorial, you will find that they never wrote it down. They conceded the opposing case at length, reported an official statement in a way that quietly disowned it, and turned the whole argument on a single or in the fourth paragraph. Every word was within your vocabulary. The position still has to be reconstructed, and that reconstruction is precisely what the compréhension des écrits marks.

The track works the explicit layer first, because it is learnable as a method rather than a talent. Locate the thesis, which is often not in the opening paragraph. Recognise the plan — concession then reversal is the most common shape in French argumentative prose, and knowing it turns an eight-hundred-word text into four moves. Use the connectors as the skeleton they are: or, ainsi, en revanche, d'abord… en définitive tell you what each paragraph is doing before you read what it says. Separate the author's voice from the voices they report, since a quoted claim is not an endorsed one.

Then the implicit layer, which is where the marks are actually lost: irony in press prose, the figurative expression that must be reformulated literally, the buried verdict in an administrative letter, numbers presented so as to imply something the numbers do not support, and the presque-vrai option — the answer that is true of the text but does not answer the question, designed for a reader in a hurry. All of it is worked on authentic society, science and press material, then compressed into timed runs at exam length, with an explicit speed protocol — skim, target, verify — and a review of the trap families the B2 reuses.