N5–N1 Reading — Information Retrieval (情報検索)

How the question works

You get a short, structured text (opening hours, a class schedule, an event announcement) and a question asking for one detail: a time, a price, a condition, the right option for a particular person. The answer is always in the text — the challenge is finding it fast under exam pressure.

Unlike the prose passages, you should not read every word here. Information retrieval is a scanning task, and trying to read it like an essay just wastes time.

Strategy & common traps

Read the question first so you know exactly what you're hunting for, then scan the notice for that keyword — a day, a number, a name. The most common trap is a detail that almost matches: hours that apply only on weekdays when the question asks about Sunday, a price with a condition attached. Always check the qualifier next to the number.

Watch for footnotes and small print ("members only", "except holidays"). The JLPT loves to hide the deciding condition there, and the wrong answers are usually the values that ignore it.

About this N5–N1 drill

Because real exam passages are copyrighted, these 40 notices are generated from templates — the format mirrors the exam, and the distractors are other real values from the same notice (a different day's closing time, another class's price). For full prose reading, see the separate 内容理解 (reading comprehension) drill, which uses original passages written for this site.

At N5 (8 questions)

At N5 the notice is short and the answer is a single explicit line — this is pure scanning.

At N4 (8 questions)

At N4 a condition or two appears (weekday vs weekend), so you match the qualifier, not just the keyword.

At N3 (8 questions)

At N3 the documents get denser, with footnotes and exceptions that quietly decide the correct value.

At N2 (8 questions)

At N2 you often have to cross-reference two parts of the notice to satisfy every condition in the question.

At N1 (8 questions)

At N1 the text is formal and information-dense, and the trap answers are the ones that ignore a small but decisive condition.