This is a case that suggests how a long text can actually be more readable than a short text. 

     Text B, "Ein Dürer von morgen," is not too difficult with respect to vocabulary, since there are a number of cognates (e.g. Restauratoren) and illustrations that might help the reader.  But the text is extremely dense in information: it introduces an art restorer, one of his most famous cases (restoration of Dürer's Madonna), and the whole international profession of art restoration.  Within one long paragraph, then, there are at least three shifts of topic and several changes between direct speech and description.  This is, therefore, not generally a very readable text.

     If you chose this text as more readable than the other, it was probably because you knew that the whole sense of the passage hinges on knowing the fact that Dürer was a painter and that you understood words like "geschändet" or "zerstört," or the way the uses of tenses in the text signals change of topic.

     To illustrate, note how dense the first five sentences are in terms of information, even though they are not syntactically complex: 

1) 460 Jahre nach Dürer. 
2) Das Telefon klingelt. 
3) "O Gott, Herr Direktor, kommen Sie." 
4)  Und dann kniet Hubert von Sonnenburg, 59, Generaldirektor der Münchener Staatagemäldesammlung vor Dürers geschändeter Madonna. 
5) Er wird mit seinem Team zwei Jahre darüber knien. 

     The first four sentences offer a dramatic vignette in simple, unrelated, staccato sentences that leave out a lot of referential information because they try to create the sense of an emergency situation.  Sentence 1 sets the scene only for a reader who knows who Dürer is;  at the same time, it confuses time frames for the reader who doesn't notice that the sentence is in the present tense -- there is no overt time reference.   The present tense of sentences 2 and 3 suggest that the setting is current, but they do not tell us where the event is taking place (in the present), or who is speaking to the Herr Direktor or who he is (director of what?).  Sentence 4 partially clears up some of the missing information: the call was from someone at the Munich Art Gallery to its director.

     Sentence 5, however, no longer belongs to the opening vignette:  it has changed tense (from "kniet" to "wird knien"), and (the reader discovers subsequently) it has changed scene to describe what an art restorer will do to a Dürer painting.

     These rapid shifts of grammatical point of view (quoted speech to description; present to future tenses) make the text very difficult to figure out;  if the reader does not know that Dürer's Madonna is a painting, that difficulty is heightened still further.

 TEXT PAIR 1, EXERCISE 1
 TEXT PAIR 2, EXERCISE 1