16 Complete Level 1 – 汉语水平考试®

The HSK 1 is the first level of the official Mandarin exam, the HSK. It's the first step on the way to validating your Mandarin skills. The exam is composed of 2 sections: Lisening and Reading.


You need at least 120 points out of 200 to obtain your HSK 1 certificate.

The structure of the Listening section is as follows:

- 4 exercises made up of 5 questions each

- 15 minutes to respond to the questions, then 3 minutes to select the responses on your answer sheet

- each audio extract is played 2 times


The structure of the Reading section is as follows:

- 4 exercises made up of 5 questions each

- 17 minutes to respond to all the questions (you will write your answers little by little on the answer sheet)

- all the questions are written in Chinese characters and in pinyin



Listening :
Exercise 1 : You will be given 5 images. You will hear an audio with a subject or verb about each image. You will have to select if the phrase for each image is "true" or "false."

Exercise 2 : You will be given 5 questions, each containing 3 images. You will hear a sentence for each question. You will have to select which image best corresponds to the sentence in the audio.

Exercise 3 : You will see 5 images and hear 5 dialogues between a woman and a man (1 sentence for each). You need to match the dialogues with the corresponding images.

Exercise 4 : The exercise is composed of 5 questions corresponding to short dialogues between 2 people. For each dialogue, you have 3 answer choices. Choose the answer that best answers the question asked in the dialogue.


Reading :
Exercise 1: You will see 5 images and 5 sentences. You need to match the image to its corresponding sentence.

Exercise 2: You will see 5 sentences to be completed and a list of 5 words. Complete the sentences by using the words given to you.

Exercise 3 : This exercise is made up of 5 questions. Each question has 2 sentences. You need to indicate if the 2 sentences have the same meaning by selecting "true" or "false."

Exercise 4 : You will see 5 sentences (either affirmations or interrogatives) and 5 sentences to associate (also either affirmations or interrogatives). You need to match each sentence with the most logical related sentence.