These two texts, from the same issue of the same popular magazine, are written on approximately the same level of difficulty, since they are intended for the same audience.  Yet their differences suggest how a reader's familiarity with a text's topic or interest in it help make that text more readable.

     Text E, "Cabrios müssen nicht teuer sein," has a lot of vocabulary and sentence constructions straight from the world of advertising -- not necessarily words that occur in the first 2000 or 5000 words that are explicitly taught to students in most German textbooks ("ausgerüstet . . . "), but very recoverable from context (" . . . mit einem 1,6-Liter-72-PS-Motor").
     However, if you as a reader do NOT know that context (if you don't drive, or don't read automobile advertisements), you would be hard-pressed to come up with English equivalents for the sentences and captions in this text.
     If you chose this text as more readable than the other, it was probably because the topic and the vocabulary are more familiar to you.  It reflects the international language of automobile afficionados ("Autos zu erschwinglichen Preisen," "verbraucht etwa 8,5 Liter auf 1000 Kilometer"), needing little or no introduction (or glosses) because of the familiar context and photographs.


 TEXT PAIR 3, EXERCISE 1
 TEXT PAIRS 4-6, EXERCISE 1