Abstract: A number of provinces confirm that new national college entrance examination papers will be used in 2023. A new feature of the new examination papers is higher weight in English reading comprehension, which will present a dilemma for high school English teaching between reading texts of different difficulty - those in the new high school English textbooks and those for examination preparation. This paper uses Readability Test to test the texts for reading comprehension in the English paper (National Paper I) of the college entrance examinations of the years 2020-2022 and those in Book 4 (optionally required) of New High School English Textbook. Results of contrastive analysis show that difficulty and all other indexes of the former are higher than those of the latter. This contrastive study can be practically significant to guide teaching of the former and preparation of the latter.

Key words: new college entrance examination, new textbook, readability test, teaching of reading, reading comprehension