Reading Comprehension (Comprensión lectora)
Reading comprehension opens the Maharashtra HSC Spanish paper. You get an unseen Spanish passage - usually a short narrative, letter or informative text of roughly 150–250 words - followed by questions written in Spanish. Nothing from the textbook appears here, so the section tests transferable skills: locating stated detail, following chronology, deducing meaning from context and recognising the writer's attitude.
The question types
- Short answer in Spanish: needs a full sentence, the right tense and the right person.
- Reference questions, e.g. ¿A qué se refiere «ello» / «allí»? Answer with the noun phrase, not the whole sentence.
- Vocabulary in context: da un sinónimo / antónimo de «...». Choose a word that fits the passage's meaning, not a dictionary gloss.
- True/false with justification: the mark is split between the V/F decision and the quoted evidence.
- Inference: ¿Por qué...? ¿Qué opinas del comportamiento de...? The signals sit in connectors.
A reading method that earns marks
Skim once for gist - who, where, what changes. Then read the questions and underline one keyword in each. Scan for that keyword or its paraphrase; examiners deliberately paraphrase, so «trabajo» may surface as «empleo». When you write, recycle the passage's vocabulary but rebuild the grammar around the question's person and tense.
Worked example
Passage line: «Aunque había estudiado poco, aprobó el examen porque las preguntas eran de comprensión.» Question: ¿Por qué aprobó el examen? Answer: Aprobó porque las preguntas eran de comprensión. Reasoning: «porque» introduces the real cause; «aunque» only concedes a fact and answers a different question (¿estudió mucho?). Writing «porque estudió poco» reverses the logic and earns nothing.
Traps
Copying a whole paragraph instead of answering; answering in English when the question is in Spanish; shifting the tense (passage in pretérito, answer in presente); leaving the justification blank in true/false items; ignoring negation such as «no siempre» in the final paragraph.