HSK 4 reading practice
Every passage here is written inside HSK 4 — the grammar and the vocabulary stay in the level, so you read rather than decode. Shortest first.
Does It Still Smell Okay闻着还能吃吗A mother smells a container of leftovers past its printed date and decides it is fine to eat; her adult daughter, raised on strict expiration dates, i…HSK 4 · 387 characters · 4 min · food
Should AI Write My Email该让人工智能写邮件吗Two coworkers argue about using artificial intelligence to draft work email. One says it saves an hour a day and no client has ever noticed. The other…HSK 4 · 447 characters · 5 min · tech
The City I Could Not Afford住不起的城市Wang Fang has decided to leave Beijing for a smaller city because rent eats most of her salary and her daily commute eats the rest of her time. Li Qia…HSK 4 · 453 characters · 5 min · current-events
Who Owns a Photograph照片是谁的A photographer discovers a company has used one of her photos in an advertisement without asking her. A friend who understands the law walks her throu…HSK 4 · 472 characters · 5 min · current-events
The Battery That Changed the Map电池改变了什么A skeptical friend doubts that cheaper batteries matter beyond electric cars. An engineer walks her through phones, storing power from the sun, and pl…HSK 4 · 500 characters · 6 min · tech
Translating a Joke笑话很难翻译A student translating a Chinese joke book asks a professional translator why a joke about hotel floor numbers stopped being funny in English. The tran…HSK 4 · 529 characters · 6 min · literature
The Old Man Who Moved the Mountains愚公移山A learner wants to quit studying Chinese because the characters feel endless and she will never live long enough to know them all. A friend tells her…HSK 4 · 541 characters · 6 min · philosophy
Grandfather's Knife爷爷的那把刀A grandson wants to throw out a family knife that has been sharpened down to half its original width over sixty years, and is startled to learn the ha…HSK 4 · 559 characters · 6 min · philosophy
The Toast You Cannot Refuse你不能拒绝的敬酒At a company dinner, a junior employee is pressured into toast after toast though he doesn't want to drink. A senior colleague explains the unwritten…HSK 4 · 566 characters · 6 min · culture
The Cook and the Ox庖丁的刀A frustrated learner complains that Chinese has too many characters to force-memorize. Her friend tells her Zhuangzi's story of Cook Ding, whose knife…HSK 4 · 567 characters · 6 min · philosophy
Have You Eaten你吃了吗A foreign tenant is confused that his elderly landlady asks every day whether he has eaten and never seems interested in the actual answer. A friend e…HSK 4 · 580 characters · 6 min · food
How a Character Was Built一个汉字是怎么来的A learner notices that 妈, 吗, and 骂 all sound alike and guesses it is because they share the component 马. A friend confirms the pattern, traces 马's sha…HSK 4 · 603 characters · 7 min · literature
The Village That Came Back重新有人的村子Ten years ago the village emptied out as family after family moved to the cities. Now a few families have come back to run guesthouses and sell tea on…HSK 4 · 608 characters · 7 min · history
The Subscription I Forgot to Cancel忘记取消的订阅Wang Fang discovers a subscription has auto-renewed for six months even though she has not used the app since spring. Li Qiang explains that this kind…HSK 4 · 616 characters · 7 min · current-events
The Review Nobody Wrote没人写的评论Two friends discover that a product's five hundred glowing reviews were generated by artificial intelligence rather than written by real buyers, and d…HSK 4 · 633 characters · 7 min · tech
The Emperor's Diary皇帝的日记Two friends compare notes on keeping a diary. One describes a Roman emperor's private notebook, never meant for readers, reminding himself each mornin…HSK 4 · 642 characters · 7 min · philosophy
The Thousand-Year Exam考了一千年的试Stuck near a school during gaokao week, a foreign friend asks why one exam shuts down the whole street. His Chinese friend answers by going back more…HSK 4 · 667 characters · 7 min · history
The Job I Did Not Get没拿到的工作A friend is rejected after a final-round interview and starts rewriting history, wondering what she should have done differently. Her friend sorts the…HSK 4 · 683 characters · 8 min · philosophy
A Map You Can Eat能吃的地图Two friends finish a China trip itinerary and realize they planned it dish by dish rather than city by city: numbing-spicy Sichuan, sweet Jiangnan, sa…HSK 4 · 758 characters · 8 min · food
The Silk Road Was a Network丝绸之路不是一条路A friend who just read a book about the Silk Road explains to a friend with the school-textbook version that it was never one road: it was many overla…HSK 4 · 774 characters · 9 min · history
The Paper That Took a Year写了一年的论文A graduate student has finally handed in a paper that took a year, and admits to a friend that the real writing took three weeks; the other months wen…HSK 4 · 776 characters · 9 min · literature
Six A.M. in the Park早上六点的公园A jet-lagged visitor takes a dawn walk and finds the park already full: taiji by the lake, square-dance speakers, a line of retirees walking backwards…HSK 4 · 882 characters · 10 min · culture
The Dark Forest黑暗森林Mark has just finished The Three-Body Problem in English and cannot sleep. His friend Xiaolin read it in Chinese years ago and, without spoiling the l…HSK 4 · 901 characters · 10 min · literature
The Doctor Who Listened愿意听你说话的医生Liu Yang saw two doctors for the same cough. The first one watched his computer screen the whole time and wrote the prescription in under five minutes…HSK 4 · 909 characters · 10 min · dailyThese readings are one step of a course that moves. GraphChinese teaches HSK 0 through HSK 6 on a mastery-gated knowledge graph: the reading arrives when the words in it are ones you have already met, and spaced review brings them back just before you would forget. One payment of $49, lifetime access.
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