For Teachers:

Give students 15 minutes to complete the reading and all 8 questions independently.

Review answers together by checking the exact sentence evidence in each paragraph.

For Learners:

First, skim the four short paragraphs A to D to grasp the general topic.

Next, read each question carefully and look for matching ideas rather than identical words.

A

The NCSC is the National Cyber Security Centre in the UK. It advises people to combine three random words to make a password. The NCSC says that this kind of password is long enough and strong enough, and that someone can crack a weak password in seconds.

B

The NCSC says that people should avoid the most common passwords, and passwords based on significant dates, a favourite sports team, or family and pet names, because social media profiles often show these. It adds that swapping a letter such as "o" for a zero is a trick that criminals already know, and that it makes the password harder to remember without making it meaningfully stronger.

C

In 2019 the NCSC published an analysis of data from breaches. It found that 23.2 million victim accounts worldwide used 123456 as a password. The next most common one, 123456789, appeared in 7.7 million accounts.

D

A password manager stores passwords safely for a person, so the person can use a different password for each service without remembering all of them. The NCSC says that people should also switch on two-step verification, called 2SV, on the password manager account.

____ TRUE ____ FALSE ____ NOT GIVEN

____ TRUE ____ FALSE ____ NOT GIVEN

____ A. It is forbidden by online accounts and password managers. ____ B. It makes passwords vulnerable to being shared on social media profiles. ____ C. It creates inconvenience for the user without offering real security benefits. ____ D. Criminals can only crack such substitutions if given several days.

____ A. They are rarely accepted by modern password manager programs. ____ B. This personal information can often be gathered from public social accounts. ____ C. They were responsible for 23.2 million data breaches in 2019. ____ D. They require two-step verification to work properly.

____ Paragraph A ____ Paragraph B ____ Paragraph C ____ Paragraph D

____ Paragraph A ____ Paragraph B ____ Paragraph C ____ Paragraph D