Unseen Passage Comprehension (Santhali prose)
The unseen passage is the first real test of independent reading: a Santhali prose text of roughly 150-250 words that you have never seen, followed by questions on central idea, specific detail, word meaning, inference, sequence of events and a suitable title. Nothing here is recall-based; every answer is proved from the printed lines.
Read the clause-final verb first
Santhali is verb-final (SOV). The last word of a clause carries tense, polarity and person agreement, so scanning clause endings tells you whether the passage is past or present, affirmative or negative, before you attempt the middle.
Track the participants
The third-person animate pronoun (uni) does not distinguish male from female; the sex of a character comes from context or from nouns such as hor (man) and kuri (woman). Plural is -ko and dual is -kin, so hon-ko is 'children' while hon-kin is 'two children'. First-person plural distinguishes inclusive from exclusive, which changes who 'we' includes inside a reported-speech line.
Signals worth highlighting
aru ('and') chains clauses; reduplication (jom-jom, sen-sen) marks repetition or intensity; onomatopoeic words cluster in descriptive writing; direct speech is often introduced by a reporting verb without quotation marks.
Worked example
Sentence: 'Hor-ko buru-re dak nelkeda, aru hon-ko jomkeda.' Step 1: split at aru into two clauses. Step 2: the clause-final verbs nelkeda and jomkeda are past tense. Step 3: -ko on hor and hon gives plural subjects. Step 4: buru-re is locative, 'on the hill'. Reading: 'The men saw water on the hill, and the children ate.' Every question on this line is answerable from those four steps.
Traps
Word-by-word translation into English order; missing a clause-final ban (negation); treating uni as 'he' only; confusing -kin with -ko; answering with a copied sentence instead of the asked point; ignoring the question word (who, why, how) and giving a true but irrelevant fact.