Wat moet u doen?

13 of our 253 A2 reading items, and the type where the question sentence matters more than the text. Wat moet u doen als u niet kunt komen? contains a condition, and the notice contains two or three actions, each attached to a different condition. All of them are real instructions from the text, and all of them are options. Getting this right is a matter of matching the condition in the question to the condition in the text, and everything else is a distraction the paper put there on purpose.

Part of Lezen, computer-marked multiple choice, the reading paper sat separately. The texts are practical: a letter from a school, a note from a pharmacy, an appointment card. Each carries several instructions, and the question names one situation out of them. The wrong options are the actions belonging to the other situations, written exactly as the text wrote them — which is why they look right when you check them against the page.

Als u … , dan …

Condition and action in one sentence. Find the als that matches the question and the answer is after the comma.

Kunt u niet komen? Bel dan …

A question used as a condition. Dutch notices do this constantly, and dan marks the action.

Neem … mee

Bring with you. An instruction for the people who do come, and therefore the wrong answer to a question about not coming.

uiterlijk / vóór

At the latest. Attaches a time limit to an action, and a question may ask about the time rather than the action.

hoeft u niets te doen

You need do nothing. A real option in these questions and sometimes the right one.

• Het uitje is op vrijdag 12 mei. Neem een lunchpakket mee. Kan uw kind niet mee? Stuur dan een mail naar de juf.

  ✗Een lunchpakket meenemen

  Asked what to do if your child cannot come: send an email. Neem een lunchpakket mee is an instruction in the same notice and belongs to the opposite case, which is exactly why it is offered.

• Onze apotheek is van 1 tot 8 augustus gesloten. U kunt in die week terecht bij apotheek De Linde aan de Kerkstraat.

  Asked where to go during the closure: De Linde. De huisarts is a place people associate with medicine and is not in the text at all — the paper mixes text-derived distractors with plausible-world ones.

• Bent u het eens met het voorstel? Dan hoeft u niets te doen. Bent u het er niet mee eens, reageer dan vóór 1 juni.

  Doing nothing is the instruction for one of the two cases. Learners avoid that option because it feels like a non-answer, and on this text it is the answer half the time.

• +Exception 1

  Sometimes the question has no condition at all — Wat moet u meenemen? — and then the whole notice is in play rather than one branch of it. Check the question for an als or a bent u before you start narrowing.

• ✗Taking an instruction from the wrong branch. Every wrong option here is a genuine instruction from the same notice, so checking it against the text confirms it and proves nothing.
• ✗Skipping the condition in the question. Als u niet kunt komen is four words and it decides the whole item.
• ✗Rejecting niets doen because it seems too easy. It is a written instruction in the text like any other.