HSK 7–9 reading

Required proof of Chinese for admission, graduation and scholarships in China. Scores are valid for two years.

Official exam page

This exam is mid-change

HSK is mid-reform and the reform is unresolved. The nine-level GF0025-2021 standard governs, and HSK 7–9 is live: 98 questions across five skills including translation, about 210 minutes, internet-based only. But HSK 1–6 as sold and sat today is still the legacy six-level format — the per-level pages describe it and it is what you will sit. A 3.0 syllabus, competency profile and sample papers for levels 1–6 are published, and the awarding body has announced a SECOND round of global trial ("试行") testing, the first sitting having been 31 January 2026. No cutover date for levels 1–6 has been announced. Anyone telling you HSK "has moved to 3.0", or that it "has not been reformed", is wrong in one direction or the other.

HSK 7–9 is the part of the reform that is not in question. It runs on the nine-level national standard, it is internet-based only, and it reports five separately scaled skills — reading among them, alongside a translation paper that lower levels do not have.

The reading section

Reading time
not published
Scored reading items
not published
Texts or passages
not published
Approximate words
not published
CEFR level
no official CEFR mapping
Published annual volume
not published — no annual figure exists from the awarding body
Awarding body
CTI Co., Ltd. (汉考国际 / Chinese Testing International), with the Center for Language Education and Cooperation (CLEC), MOE

What that means in practice

The confirmed 3.0-era exam: 98 questions across Listening, Reading, Writing, Translation and Speaking in about 210 minutes, internet-based only, scored by IRT into "Below HSK (Level 7)", "HSK (Level 7)", "HSK (Level 8)" and "HSK (Level 9)" under GF0025-2021. Reading is one of five separately reported skills, each IRT-scaled to a 0–100 report score; raw item counts per skill are not published. Aimed at master's and doctoral students in China, Chinese majors abroad, and professionals working in Chinese.

Every figure on this page was checked against the awarding body on that date. Exam formats change; check the official page before you book.

How well reading practice fits this exam

A full reading section

Reading is a complete, separately scored section with real passages. Training it moves a number that appears on your result.

LingoRead trains reading. It does not prepare a speaking or writing paper, it does not mark free-text answers, and it does not issue or predict an official result.

Practise reading for this exam

Start with this exam already selected. You get a passage at your level every day, with audio, tap-to-translate and comprehension questions.

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One sitting, three possible outcomes

You do not register for level 7, 8 or 9 separately. One exam is sat and the result places you into one of the bands the standard defines, or below the entry band. Scoring is by item response theory, with each of the five skills scaled onto its own report score, so a strong translation result does not disguise a weak reading one — every skill is visible.

Because the scaling is IRT-based, raw item counts per skill are not published, and this page states none. What is published — the whole-exam question count, the approximate duration, the delivery mode and the band names — is printed with its source.

Who this band is actually for

It is aimed at master’s and doctoral students studying in China, at Chinese majors abroad, and at people working professionally in Chinese. That audience shapes the texts: this is academic and professional reading, and the translation paper means you are expected to render meaning rather than merely recognise it.

That distinction matters for how you prepare. Reading for gist is enough to answer a comprehension question and not enough to translate a sentence. Practising precise reading — what exactly does this clause commit the writer to — is the work that serves both halves.

What LingoRead can and cannot do here

It supplies daily Chinese reading at your level with audio, tap-to-translate and comprehension questions, and it keeps looked-up words as review cards built from their own sentences — useful for precise reading at this level, where a character’s meaning is often fixed by its neighbours.

It does not train translation, speaking, listening or writing, and this band scores all of them. Anyone offering full HSK 7–9 preparation on the strength of reading practice is describing one fifth of the exam.

Questions people ask

Free tools that help

Our four free tools are English-only for now, so there is no matching tool for this exam. They are still worth a look if you also read in English.

See the free tools

Other levels of HSK

No dedicated page — the research did not show enough search demand for it.

HSK 7–9 reading: the band that already runs on the new standard | LingoRead