Englisch Leseverstehen B2 (Übungstest)

Text 1: Quiet Wednesdays

(1) When Fenwick Digital, a software company with around 300 employees, announced last spring that Wednesdays would be free of meetings, many staff members were skeptical. "My first thought was that the meetings would simply move to Tuesday and Thursday," admits project manager Dana Price. To prevent exactly that, the company set a limit: no team was allowed to schedule more meetings on the other days than before the trial.

(2) Six months later, the company has published the results of an internal survey. Most employees said they found it easier to concentrate on complex tasks, and the number of messages sent on Wednesdays fell sharply. However, not everyone was convinced. Staff in customer support, whose work depends on constant contact with clients and colleagues, reported that the rule made their days more stressful, because urgent questions had to wait.

(3) The management has therefore decided to keep Quiet Wednesdays but to make an exception for the support team, which will instead have two meeting-free mornings a week. "We learned that one rule can't fit every job," says Price. Other firms in the region have already asked for advice, although Fenwick stresses that its experience may not apply to companies with very different ways of working.

Text 2: Why We Put Things Off

(1) Most people know the feeling: an important task is waiting, yet we clean the kitchen, answer old emails or scroll through our phones. For a long time, procrastination was treated as a problem of poor time management, and the usual advice was to make better plans and stricter schedules.

(2) Many psychologists now see it differently. In their view, people often delay tasks not because they cannot organize their time but because the task triggers unpleasant feelings, such as boredom, anxiety or self-doubt. Putting the task off brings immediate relief. The price is paid later, when the deadline comes closer and the stress grows even greater.

(3) If this explanation is correct, a perfect timetable will not help much on its own. More promising strategies deal with the feelings involved. One is to make the first step so small that it hardly seems threatening: instead of "write the report", the goal becomes "open the document and write one sentence". Another is to react to past delays with understanding rather than harsh self-criticism, since blaming yourself tends to make the task even more unpleasant.

(4) None of this means that planning is useless. But a plan is only the map; whether we actually set out depends on how we feel about the journey.

Text 3: Letting the Sea Back In

(1) For more than a century, a two-kilometer earth wall protected the farmland around the village of Saltmere from the sea. Keeping it in good condition, however, became more and more expensive, and after a severe storm damaged it again three years ago, the local authority made a surprising decision: instead of repairing the old wall, it built a new one further inland and opened the old one to the tides.

(2) The idea, known as "managed realignment," is that the land between the two walls slowly turns into salt marsh. Marsh plants slow the water down and reduce the force of the waves before they reach the new wall, which can therefore be lower and cheaper to maintain. The marsh also offers a home to birds and young fish and stores carbon in its muddy soil.

(3) Not everybody was pleased. Two farmers lost fields that their families had worked for generations, and although they were compensated, one of them says that "money doesn't replace land." Some residents also worried that opening the wall would put their homes at risk, a fear that the authority tried to address at several public meetings.

(4) So far, the results look encouraging. Birdwatchers have recorded species that had not been seen in the area for decades, and the new wall came through last winter's storms without damage. Experts warn, though, that a marsh needs many years to develop fully, so it is too early to call the project a success.