This year’s English reading section of the Comprehensive Assessment Program (CAP) for junior-high school students in Taiwan featured a wide range of topics, including group chat etiquette, the history of labor movements in the UK and environmental collapse.
The CAP entered its second day on Sunday, with students completing the natural science, English reading and English listening sections by 12:30pm, the Ministry of Education said in a news release on the same day.
Tsai Yu-ling (蔡鈺伶), a teacher at New Taipei Municipal Yonghe Junior High School, said the exam topics were “very diverse” and assessed students’ analytical, reasoning and inferencing abilities.
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
Commenting on the 43-question multiple-choice English reading exam, Tsai said that questions 35 to 37 featured a “political satire cartoon” depicting British strike action in the 1970s and were among the most challenging.
The cartoon and accompanying text described how “electricity workers in the UK asked to be paid more” in 1972 and “decided to stop working until their wish was answered.”
A caption beneath an image of a man wearing a coal miner’s hat read: “This picture shows what many people thought of the electricity workers during this ‘dark’ time.”
Students were required to interpret the visual elements and the written text to grasp the narrator’s viewpoint and answer the questions correctly, Tsai said.
Questions 22 and 23 involved a group chat scenario, in which one participant interrupted another’s wedding announcement to share their own news, and was criticized for “stealing someone’s thunder,” she said.
The accompanying graphic — which depicted fictional characters Jenny, Linda and Mark exchanging messages in a WhatsApp-style chat titled “Friends Forever Group” — reflected students’ real-life experiences on social media and encouraged empathy in communication, she added.
Questions 29 to 31 focused on a comic strip about Easter Island, which showed islanders cutting down forests to move large statues that the cartoon said they “loved making.”
One caption read: “When the last trees fell to the ground, people on the island fell, too,” emphasizing the importance of sustainable development, Tsai said.
The CAP is a nationwide standardized examination administered to nearly all ninth-grade students, typically about 15 years of age, and covers Chinese, English, mathematics, social studies, natural sciences and writing.
The scores for this year’s exam would be mailed out on June 6 and would also be available online that same day, the ministry said.
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