Reading and Comprehension
The Reading and Comprehension domain tests whether you can extract meaning from an unseen passage - usually argumentative journalism or a discursive essay - and then prove that extraction in your own written answers. Questions move from literal retrieval through inference and attitude to evaluation, and typically include an "explain in your own words" task and a summary under a strict word limit.
Reading for what is not stated
- Retrieval: find a stated detail and present it in the shape the question expects - a phrase for "which detail", a full clause for "explain why".
- Inference: a conclusion the text licenses but never states; it must be traceable to specific words, not to your general knowledge.
- Attitude and tone: look for evaluative adjectives, modality (must, may, allegedly), concession (admittedly, while), and scare quotes; these leak the writer's stance.
- Function: explain what a paragraph, statistic or anecdote is doing where it sits - illustrating, conceding, rebutting, shifting scale.
- Summary: keep claims, drop examples and repetition, stay inside the limit; examiners penalise padding and the omission of a main point equally.
Worked example
Passage: "The council approved the scheme, citing 'community benefit', though no resident was consulted." Question: what does the writer suggest about the council's justification? Weak answer: "It says community benefit." Strong answer: "The justification is hollow: the scare quotes distance 'community benefit' from the council's own voice, and the concessive 'though' reveals that the people supposedly benefiting were never asked. The benefit is asserted, not evidenced." The strong answer names a device, quotes the minimum, and states the effect.
Traps that cost marks
- Copying the passage verbatim when the rubric says "in your own words" - the mark is for rewording, not location.
- Answering the quotation rather than the question: giving a definition when asked for an effect.
- Summary bloat: examples and statistics are often weight-bearing in the passage but not in the summary.
- Ignoring command words; "briefly" and "with reference to lines X–Y" change what counts as a complete answer.