The reading comprehension section of your standardized test will include various types of passages and questions.
The reading passages will be from a variety of academic disciplines.
However, students do not need specialist subject area knowledge in any academic discipline for their basic skills reading test.
Free Reading Practice Tests
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Types of Questions
Your reading comprehension test will include the following types of questions.
Main ideas
Main idea questions will ask you to find the main idea of the entire passage or of a single paragraph.
Supporting details
For supporting detail questions, you will need to scan the passage quickly to look for specific information.
Compare and contrast
These kinds of questions may ask you to identify which things are being compared and contrasted.
Alternatively, you may have to discover differences or similarities between two texts.
Drawing conclusions
In order to draw a conclusion based on a reading comprehension passage, you need to make a small logical deduction based on the information provided.
You should avoid wild guesses or conclusions that are not supported by the text.
Author’s Purpose
Questions on the author’s purpose require you to analyze the passage and determine whether the author is trying to educate, persuade, or entertain the reader.
Author’s purpose questions may also ask you to classify the text more specifically as emphatic, critical, or objective.
Fact vs. opinion
These types of reading comprehension questions will provide statements from the passage and ask you which one of them contains an opinion.
Types of Reading Comprehension Passages
You will see passages from various academic areas on your reading comprehension test.
Remember to answer the questions based solely on the information contained in the reading comprehension passage.
You will see reading comprehension texts from:
Social sciences
These reading comprehension passages include subjects like psychology, sociology, political science, and cultural studies.
Natural sciences
This subject area is sometimes referred to as hard sciences. It includes the academic disciplines of biology, chemistry, physics, geology or earth science, health, and medicine.
Humanities
These types of texts are taken from business, law, history, education, communications, and media studies.
You may also see reading comprehension passages that contain extracts from:
Prose fiction
Questions on excerpts of prose fiction will ask for main ideas, supporting details, author’s tone or purpose, and the intentions and thoughts of characters.
In addition, prose fiction questions frequently ask about narrative voice.
In other words, these questions will ask you: “Who is the narrator of this passage?”
Practical passages
These types of passages will give instructions about a process or describe how to do something step by step.
You will need to read the passage carefully since the steps may not be given in chronological order.
You may also like to try our free problems on writing and math.