Reading Comprehension of Prose and Non-Fiction
What you must know
Comprehension rewards precision, not volume. You must be able to retrieve explicit detail, infer meaning from evidence, identify the writer's purpose, tone and viewpoint, distinguish fact from opinion, detect bias, and explain how structure and language choices create effects. In non-fiction, separate the writer's argument from the evidence offered for it. In prose, separate the narrator from the writer, and track shifts in mood, setting or attitude across paragraphs.
Traps
The commonest losses come from ignoring the command word: 'explain' needs reasoning, 'summarise' needs compression, and 'in your own words' forbids lifting the phrase. Candidates over-infer, inventing motives the passage does not support, or under-infer, copying a whole sentence when three words would answer. Check the mark tariff: a three-mark question usually wants three distinct ideas.
Worked example
Question: 'The harbour was drowning in visitors.' Explain what this suggests. Weak answer: It was very busy. (No reference to the image.) Strong answer: The metaphor 'drowning' suggests visitors arrived in overwhelming numbers, so many that the harbour seemed swamped and out of control, implying mild disapproval. Rule of thumb: quote a short phrase, name the technique, then explain the effect. Quotation, technique, effect.