Reading and comprehension of authentic and literary texts
Reading here covers both authentic texts - news articles, editorials, blogs, advertisements, infographics - and literary texts: short stories, poems, novel excerpts, and drama. Questions range from literal detail to inference, tone, text organization, and vocabulary in context. The enriched level expects you to notice how a text works, not only what it says.
Reading efficiently
- Read the title, headings, and first and last sentences for gist before attacking the questions.
- Scan for names, dates, and numbers when a question asks for a detail.
- For literary texts, track narrator, setting, conflict, and shifts in tone; these are what the questions target.
Inference, tone, and irony
- An inference is text evidence plus logic - never your own opinion about the topic.
- Tone words to know: nostalgic, critical, ironic, sarcastic, admiring, resigned, defensive.
- Irony appears when wording contradicts the situation. Look for quotation marks around a loaded word, a "proudly" next to a failure, praise that is obviously backhanded.
Vocabulary in context
Use the surrounding sentence, the word's positive or negative charge, and prefixes and suffixes (mis-, -less, over-) before reaching for a dictionary.
Worked example
Excerpt: The council proudly unveiled its new "green" parking lot: forty spaces of fresh asphalt where the community garden used to be. Question: What is the writer's attitude toward the project? Reasoning: "proudly" reports the council's view, not the writer's. "Fresh asphalt where the community garden used to be" contradicts "green", and the quotation marks around "green" signal that the writer doubts the label. The attitude is therefore ironic and critical - not admiring, which is the trap answer that grabs "proudly" and stops reading.
Traps
- Answering from what you think about the topic rather than what the text says.
- Offering an inference when the question asks for a detail, or vice versa.
- Missing EXCEPT, NOT, and according to the author in the question stem.
- Copying a full sentence instead of formulating an answer.
- Ignoring line references or the title, which often carries the theme.
- Translating word for word and losing the sentence's meaning.