English

Reading and Thinking Skills

4,011 words, 8 sections

Reading and Thinking Skills carries 74 distinct questions across 31 official papers between 2002 and 2026, set by the same six boards that set the rest of English, with a mean item difficulty of 2.02 on the bank scale and 458 active questions in the practice bank. The questions divide between Reading Comprehension and Analysis at 69 and Critical Reading and Inference at 5, so the chapter is dominated by one skill: reading a short passage and answering a question about it. The syllabus names three outcomes, scanning to answer short questions, deducing meaning from context, and analysing how a writer uses language for figurative effect, and the paper reaches all three. A student who has mastered the chapter can find a stated detail quickly, name the main idea or a suitable title, draw an inference the passage implies but never states, work out what a word means in its sentence, and recognise a simile, a symbol or a satirical purpose.

The commonest question gives a short passage and asks for one fact that is written down somewhere in it. The answer is usually in the passage verbatim or close to it, and the skill is locating it quickly rather than reasoning about it. How long will the power be off? Less than two hours, because the notice says power will not be out longer than two hours. Where did the writer keep his savings? In a sock, because the passage says he keeps his savings in silver dollars in a sock. Where did most of the people end up when the panic ended? Franklin Park, four miles out, because the passage lists the distances and attaches each group to a place.

One small trap hides inside this otherwise mechanical group, and it is the number that is present but not wanted. A passage says a family has five children and then asks how many siblings the narrator has; the number in the passage is five, but the narrator is one of the five, so the answer is four. The examiner relies on a student who finds the number and stops reading, and the recorded wrong option "Five" is exactly the number that was found.

It is worth being honest about part of this chapter. A run of questions tagged to Reading and Thinking Skills are not comprehension at all but general knowledge recall: who wrote the national anthem, when the first constitution of Pakistan was approved, which prophet could speak to animals, which surah is called the mother of the Quran, when the first Indo-Pakistan war was fought. These are answerable from memory rather than from any passage, and a student should recognise them for what they are instead of hunting for a passage that is not there.

Worked example

Take the two questions set on the power-outage notice. The first asks why the power is being turned off and offers to reduce total demand, to save money, to make it cooler and to make the city pay its bill. The passage states that the cut will reduce the total demand for electricity and prevent a city-wide shutdown, so the reason is to reduce total demand; the other three are plausible motives a reader might supply but the passage does not say. The second asks how long the power will be off and offers longer than two hours, less than two hours, for one day and until the weather changes. The passage says power will not be out longer than two hours, so the duration is less than two hours, and the option "Longer than two hours" is the trap because it copies the words longer and two hours out of the phrase no longer than two hours. The step students get wrong is matching words rather than meaning: the sentence bounds the outage from above, so the answer is the option that stays under the bound.

6 more sections in this chapter

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Introduction

1. Scanning for a stated detailThe commonest question gives a short passage and asks for one fact that is written down somewhere in it. The answer is usually in the passage verbatim or close