The ISE B1 English exam (that cab drivers in London have to pass to renew their Private Hire Driver’s Licence, before 31st March 2017) is a test with Reading, Writing, Listening and Speaking questions to test your overall level of English language skills.
There are 2 parts. First is the Reading and writing test – this will take 2 hours.
Next is the Speaking and Listening test. This is much shorter and will only last for 18 minutes.
ISE B1 Test: Reading and Writing tasks
In the reading and writing part of the test, there are 4 separate tasks.
In the table below, you can see that:
- Reading Task 1 has 1 long text of 400 words to read and 15 questions to answer
- Reading Task 2 has 4 short texts of 400 words in total with 15 questions to answer
- Writing Task 1 is based on the information from Reading Task 2 and then you must write 100 words or more
- Writing Task 2 is where you write 100 to 130 words
IMPORTANT – DO NOT RUN OUT OF TIME
The main reason why some students get a low score or fail an English as a second language exam is because they run out of time and do not answer all the questions, or they do not have enough time to finish a writing task that has lots of points available.
Do not run out of time – you have to answer questions quickly!
Think about it for a moment. Look at Task 1 Reading in the table above.
There are 400 words to read and 15 questions to answer. Trinity College London advise students to only spend 20 minutes on this section.
That means you have to read all those words AND answer every question in under a minute.
This is a super important point and can not be stressed enough – you must be very quick, extremely focused and concentrate for the whole 2 hours.
It’s not easy to do that! You MUST PRACTISE doing these type of English test questions before you sit your ISE B1 exam. If you don’t practise before your exam, you will definitely be too slow and miss some of the questions.
So, let’s look at the types of questions in the Trinity ISE B1 test that you will face.
