Paper 2 Ab Initio

Paper 2: Receptive skills—listening and reading
Duration: 1 hour 45 minutes
Weighting: 50%

Paper 2 is based on the five themes: identities, experiences, human ingenuity, social organization, sharing the planet.
This examination is externally set and externally assessed. It is divided into two separate sections: listening (three audio passages) and reading (three written passages) covering different topics drawn from the five themes. The students’ understanding of the six passages is assessed in this examination; it does not test the students’ knowledge of any factual content of a specific topic. All audio and written passages are in thetarget language and all answers must be provided in the target language.

Note: International-mindedness is central to the IB philosophy. It is expected that students will
have been exposed to a variety of texts, both oral and written, that demonstrate linguistic variation
and regional accents. Linguistic variation and regional accents appearing in texts used for external
assessment are intended to reflect this expectation while also being comprehensible to the students.