Reading across a range of text types (informational, persuasive, literary, visual/multimodal)
What this domain tests
Texts in the reading assessment include informational articles, persuasive pieces, literary extracts, and visual or multimodal texts such as advertisements, charts, and infographics. You need to recognise genre conventions and read visuals as part of the text, not as decoration.
Core rules
- Informational texts: headings, captions, diagrams, and statistics support a main idea. Check how the visual evidence relates to the written claim.
- Persuasive texts: appeals to expertise, emotion, popularity, or urgency; rhetorical questions; imperative verbs; selective statistics.
- Literary texts: narrative voice, character, setting, conflict, imagery, and figurative language. The narrator is not automatically the author.
- Visual/multimodal texts: read title, axes, labels, units, legend, scale, colour, and layout. Ask what the visual shows and what it cannot show.
- Integrate modes: a headline may overstate what the chart actually supports.
Worked example
A bar chart shows recycling rates for five regions. The South region has the tallest bar. The headline reads: “South leads the nation in recycling.” Question: What does the chart support? Reasoning: The chart supports “South has the highest rate among the five regions shown.” It does not support “nation”, because only five regions appear and the chart may omit others. The headline generalises beyond the data. Answer: the narrower claim about the regions shown.
Traps
Reading the headline instead of the data; ignoring a truncated axis or missing units; treating an illustration as proof; confusing the narrator’s views with the author’s; assuming a persuasive text is unreliable simply because it persuades - judge the evidence, not the genre.