for reading aloud. The new edition of Paddington Takes a Test has a more attractive jacket, wider pages, and larger type than the original American edition (1980). The minimal changes to the text consist of shifts from the English spellings of certain words to the American; for example, changing centre to center, colour to color, and manoeuvre to maneuver. Apart from the jacket illustration, which is entirely new, Peggy Fortnum's original drawings illustrate this well-designed new edition.

This revised edition continues the adventures of the cheerful but hapless bear. Paddington takes a driving test, models for a painting class, and mistakenly locks a neighbor in the sauna. The episodic chapters, which are essentially unchanged from the original, are full of humorous misunderstandings. Black-and-white line drawings accompany the undemanding text.