| In China, College Entrance Examination is always the most important examination for a student or even for an entire family. It is said to have a decisive effect on an individual's life. Since 1977, China's College Entrance Examination has gone through various stages and reforms. As for the English subject, reading comprehension part has always been the most important factor because of its large score proportion. With the introduction of Reform Opening up Policy, English teaching and learning have changed a lot during this period. Not only has student's English level been enhanced but also English testing becomes more reasonable. This paper will focus on the NMET's (National Matriculation English Test) reading comprehension part. The study will be a diachronic one on NMET in the last over 30 years. The theoretical framework is based on the discourse analysis and Bachman's Task Characteristics. The paper will be developed in two directions:discourse input analysis and question design analysis. Discourse input analysis in this paper includes passage length, sentence length and types, topic variety and genre. Question design analysis includes response types, reading skills coverage and question writing.Through the diachronic study, the main findings are the following:Firstly, the reading test papers vary from period to period. Specifically, at first, NMET consist of 1 passage which was rather short and simple questions. At the second stage, NMET consist of 3 passages and the question format was rather steady with multiple questions and contained some logic questions. At the third stage, NMET consists of 4 passages and the question items embodied very complicated characteristics. Finally, five passages are included with wide reading skill coverage and more argumentative ones. As time goes by, the response types are changed into a unified version——multiple choice questions. The author believes that the reading comprehension test will be more appropriate if several response types can be adopted.Secondly, the selection of reading materials is full of wide extensiveness, novelty, education, ideology and authenticity. The author finds out that three stages could be categorized:1977-1988,1989-1993,1994-2009. The first stage mainly put forward humorous story, with no specific topic area. The second stage included the world introduction and people introduction as well as the humorous stories. The Reform and Opening up policy made both the country and people more open to things world-wide. The last stage transferred the traditional orientation and enlarged the topic areas to distinct extent.Finally, the subtle change of NMET's reading comprehension can be related to China's social changes and progress. For example, only the humorous story was adopted in the past, which is far away from life. Students'language ability was just a kind of technique in examination paper but not in real social life. However now, almost each year's advertisement passages are used to assess student's ability to pick out useful information. In addition, natural science and technology comprised the largest part of scientific passages. But gradually, social science finds its stable position in NMET. Psychology also has a chance to occur in NMET. As the further social development goes on, China not only pays attention to material treasure and technology, but also humanities and mental world of people, which is a trace of social progress.
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