Placement Test for the Cambridge English Readers

Reading requires a lot of knowledge. You must know about spelling and grammar, and
must have reading skills. But vocabulary is perhaps the most important part of reading. If
you do not know what the words mean, reading is impossible.
For this reason, each Cambridge English Readers level has its own limited list of words.
This makes sure that you will not meet too many unknown words in your reading. If you
know most of the words in a level, you can probably read that level and enjoy the books.
Research shows that you probably need to know 95% or more of the words in a book to
understand it well, and to guess the meaning of the words you do not know. 95% means
that you will not know 1 word out of 20. This does not seem like very many, but look at
the following passage. Imagine that the blanks are unknown words. How easy is it to
read?
The _____ sat in his chair and stared at the clock. The _____ swung back and
forth as the time passed by. He was _____ to think of new ideas for his story,
but his mind was a blank. This had never happened to him before, as stories
had always flowed easily from his mind, usually so fast that he did not have
the time to write them down before they disappeared from _____ and new
ideas took their place. But now he was stuck for _____, and his book deadline
was approaching with a speed that truly frightened him.
[answers at the end of this document]
If you know all of the non-blank words in the passage, you can probably understand the
main points of the story. But if you are like most readers, you would not like any more
unknown words than this. In fact, you probably want far fewer unknown words.
Knowing 99% of the words (1 unknown word in 100) would make the reading far more
enjoyable.
With this idea in mind, we have made a vocabulary test for each level based on the word
list for that level. This should help you decide what percentage of vocabulary you are
likely to know at each level. There are 30 items on the test at each level, so you would
want to know at least 28 words on the test to be near 95%, but of course 29 or 30 words
would be better.
But please remember that these tests are NOT meant to be general vocabulary tests.
They are based on the word lists used in the Cambridge English Readers series, and so
should not be used to indicate general vocabulary size. A test suitable for indicating
general vocabulary size can be found in the back of the following book:
Norbert Schmitt. 2000. Vocabulary in Language Teaching. Cambridge
University Press.

We hope these tests will help you to pick the best level of the Cambridge English
Readers so that you can enjoy the books right from the beginning. Have fun!

Diane Schmitt
Nottingham Trent University
Norbert Schmitt
University of Nottingham

Answers:
author
pendulum
desperate
consciousness
inspiration