Reading Comprehension and Critical Reading
What this domain tests
This domain tests how readers extract, infer and evaluate meaning. Expect items on gist, detail, inference, reference, text organisation, the writer's purpose and tone, and the critical appraisal of evidence and argument - plus the pedagogy of teaching these skills.
Core rules and concepts
- Bottom-up decoding (letters to words to syntax) and top-down prediction (schema, genre knowledge) operate together; skilled readers switch between them.
- Reading modes: skimming for gist, scanning for detail, intensive reading for language, extensive reading for fluency.
- Cohesion is signalled by reference (pronouns, this), substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical chains; coherence is the reader's construction of a consistent text world, which can succeed even when cohesion is thin.
- Inference means the answer is implied, not stated; distinguish it from literal detail and from the reader's world knowledge.
- Text organisation patterns - problem–solution, cause–effect, compare–contrast, claim–counterclaim - help you predict where information sits.
- Critical reading examines purpose, audience, stance, tone, bias, hedging (may, tends to), modality, evidence quality and rhetorical appeals (ethos, pathos, logos); it separates fact, opinion and claim, and spots fallacies such as hasty generalisation, false dilemma, straw man and ad hominem.
Worked example
Text: 'The report stops short of recommending a ban.' Question: does the writer support a ban?
Reasoning: stops short of implies movement toward but not arrival at a position. It signals caution, not endorsement and not outright opposition, so the defensible answer is 'cautious/neutral'. Selecting 'opposed' overreads the hedge; selecting 'supportive' ignores stops short.
Traps
- Choosing an option that is true in the world but not stated or implied in the passage.
- Confusing the writer's own view with a view the writer merely reports.
- Overreading tone from a single loaded word.
- Ignoring scope words (all, some, only, mainly), which often decide the answer.
- Matching key words instead of matching meaning - distractors echo the passage deliberately.