Six new texts and thirty-two questions, weighted hard towards the two that are hardest to guess: which quotation proves it, and what exactly is being compared. Sixteen of the thirty-two are one of those two.
Every question in this set is one of these. After you answer, the badge in the explanation tells you which one it was — and at the end you get a score for each.
Spot it: the writer puts two things next to each other that do not match — loud/quiet, inside/outside, kind/disastrous. The answer is always about the difference, and about what the difference makes you feel.
Spot it: like, as, the way that. Then ask the only question that matters: which single quality is shared? Never ‘they are the same’ — a comparison only ever borrows one thing.
Italics, bold, a one-line paragraph, a repeated word, a dash. None of these are accidents. Ask: what would be lost if it were written normally? That loss is the answer.
Do not pick the line that sounds most like the idea. Test each option on its own: if I only had this line, would I know it for certain? Only one option survives that.
Purpose questions are why questions, never what questions. Stop hunting for facts and ask what the writer was trying to do to you — make you curious, believe her, keep reading, say yes.
Ask two things: who is telling me this, and how do they sound — amused, careful, angry, fair. A text about someone is not automatically told by them.
A diagram, a heading, a caption, a subheading. Ask: what does this do that the words alone could not? Usually it either splits the ideas up, or shows a thing that is hard to describe.
Read the whole text first, once, without looking at the questions. Then answer. Every explanation names the move as well as the answer, because the move is the part you take to the next paper.
Pupils at Marsh Lane Primary will be taught in the village hall until at least Friday, after a burst pipe put twelve centimetres of water through the ground floor on Sunday night.
The leak was found at seven on Monday morning by the caretaker, Ray Dunmore. ‘I opened the door and heard it before I saw it,’ he said. ‘Forty years I have worked in schools. I have never heard a building sound like that.’
The reception class lost its reading corner and most of its books. ‘We had just finished sorting them into colours,’ said Amara, aged six. ‘It took us ages.’
Headteacher Ms Ferriday said no lessons would be cancelled. ‘The building is shut. The school is not,’ she said. Parents have been asked to drop children at the hall from 8.40 am.
The council has not yet said who will pay for the repairs.
Which quotation proves that the caretaker was shocked by what he found?
B. Three of these are close, which is exactly how this question type works. Hearing it first is odd but not shocking; forty years is only background. Only ‘I have never heard a building sound like that’ says, in his own words, that this was outside everything he knew. The forty-years line is there to make that one land — but it is not the proof itself.Which quotation proves it
Which quotation proves that the pupils had put work into the reading corner?
A. Losing something does not prove you worked on it. Sorting them into colours is the work, and just finished is what makes it hurt. Test each line alone: which one would still prove the point with the rest of the article deleted?Which quotation proves it
‘The building is shut. The school is not.’ The headteacher uses two short sentences in order to
D. Same shape, opposite endings — the sentences are built to snap. Written as although the building is shut, the school will carry on, the point survives but the punch does not. Short paired sentences in a quotation are nearly always doing emphasis.Marks the writer leaves on purpose
The last line — ‘The council has not yet said who will pay for the repairs.’ — is there to
D. A report ends on the part of the story that is not finished, which is how it hints there will be more to come. It stops well short of blaming anyone — has not yet said is careful, neutral wording.Why this bit is here at all
The writer of this report
C. Count the opinions belonging to the writer: none. Every judgement in the piece is inside somebody’s quotation marks. That is what a news report’s voice is — the reporter gets the facts and lends everyone else the microphone.Whose eyes, and what tone
‘I opened the door and heard it before I saw it.’ This tells you the flood was
B. If sound arrives ahead of sight, the sound must be big. He is not describing what water looks like; he is telling you what it sounded like from the doorway. When someone says which sense reached them first, that sense is the point.Saying one thing is like another
The Arctic tern is a small white seabird, about the length of a ruler, and it makes the longest journey of any animal alive.
Every year it flies from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back — roughly seventy thousand kilometres. Over a lifetime that adds up to about the distance to the Moon and back, three times.
Because it is chasing summer. It breeds in the Arctic in the northern summer, then leaves before the ice comes and arrives in Antarctica just as the southern summer begins. The tern spends its whole life in daylight. It is the only animal that has arranged never to have a winter.
It does not fly in a straight line. It rides the wind the way a sailing boat does, swinging out in great curves to pick up whatever is blowing, which is slower on the map and far faster in practice. It feeds as it goes, snatching fish from the surface without landing.
A tern weighs about as much as an apple.
‘about the length of a ruler’ compares the tern with a ruler in order to show
C. A ruler is the one object every reader has held, so it is being used as a measuring stick and nothing else — length. It says nothing about weight or speed, which the writer measures separately later.Saying one thing is like another
‘about the distance to the Moon and back, three times’ is used because
B. Seventy thousand kilometres a year is a real figure and a useless one — nobody can picture it. The Moon gives it a shape. Watch the trap in option B: the number is far too big to imagine, not too small.Saying one thing is like another
‘It rides the wind the way a sailing boat does’. What exactly is shared?
B. The comparison borrows one thing: the tactic. Going the long way round to catch the wind is slower on a map and quicker in real life, for a boat and a bird alike. Being white or being at sea is true of both and is not what the sentence is about.Saying one thing is like another
‘A tern weighs about as much as an apple.’ Placing this at the very end works because it
A. On its own, an apple is just a weight. Arriving after seventy thousand kilometres, it becomes the whole point of the article. The same comparison in the first paragraph would have been a fact; here it is the ending.Saying one thing is like another
The two subheadings divide the article into
C. Why bother? answers the reason; How it survives the crossing answers the method. Ask what question each heading is answering and the structure of any article opens up.What the heading or picture adds
The writer asks ‘Why bother?’ as a heading in order to
D. By that point you have just read that a bird the size of a ruler flies seventy thousand kilometres, and the obvious reaction is why? The writer says it for you and then answers it. That is a heading doing the job of a conversation.Why this bit is here at all
Nadia had been coming to the allotment every Saturday since she was four, and she knew the rules. You did not walk on the beds. You did not pick anything without asking. And you did not, ever, talk while Grandad was listening to the shipping forecast on the little radio.
This Saturday the radio stayed in his coat pocket.
He handed her the trowel without being asked, which he had never done, and sat down on the upturned crate at the end of the path. ‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘You know where they go.’
Nadia knelt at the end of the row. She had planted onions beside him a hundred times. She had never planted them on her own, and the ground looked different from down here — wider, somehow, and much further to the fence.
Behind her the crate creaked as he shifted. She did not turn round. She pressed the first onion in, and heard him say, very quietly, ‘Bit deeper, love.’
Which quotation proves that something was different about this Saturday?
D. The first three lines set up what always happens. Only the radio line breaks the pattern, and it is given a paragraph of its own so you cannot miss it. In a story built on a routine, the proof of change is the first thing that does not fit.Which quotation proves it
Which quotation proves that Nadia found the job harder than she expected?
C. Nothing has physically changed about the allotment — the row is the row. It only looks longer because she is doing it alone. When a description of a place suddenly changes, it is usually telling you about the person, not the place.Which quotation proves it
The writer sets the list of rules at the start against the rest of the story to show that
A. Three rules, held since she was four — then the radio stays in his pocket and he hands over the trowel. The rules are there so that you feel them being set aside. Nothing suggests forgetfulness; he is still watching closely enough to correct her depth.Setting two unlike things side by side
‘This Saturday the radio stayed in his coat pocket.’ sits alone as a paragraph because it
D. Put it back on the end of the paragraph above and it becomes one more detail. Alone, it is a door closing. A single-sentence paragraph is a writer pointing.Marks the writer leaves on purpose
Which quotation proves that Grandad was still watching every move she made?
A. He could have sat there with his eyes shut. Only the correction proves he was tracking the depth of every single onion. Sitting nearby proves presence; the correction proves attention. The question asked for attention.Which quotation proves it
‘Bit deeper, love.’ is said ‘very quietly’ because Grandad
C. Loud advice would make it his row again. Quiet advice lets it stay hers. How a line is delivered is often carrying more than the line itself — always read the words around the speech.Whose eyes, and what tone
A lifejacket does not hold you up by being light. It holds you up by taking up room.
Push a beach ball under the water and you can feel the water shoving back. That shove is the water trying to fill the space the ball has taken. The bigger the space, the harder the shove. A lifejacket is a beach ball you are wearing.
This is why a lifejacket is bulky and not heavy, and why squashing one to make it pack smaller ruins it. A flat lifejacket takes up no room, so the water has nothing to push against.
‘A lifejacket is a beach ball you are wearing.’ The shared quality is that both
C. The whole explanation rests on volume, not weight — that is the one quality being borrowed. Colour and where you use them are true of both and completely beside the point. Find the idea the writer is explaining, and the comparison will be about that.Saying one thing is like another
The beach ball is used before the lifejacket is explained because
D. A good comparison starts from something already in your hands. You have felt that shove; you have probably never thought about buoyancy. Explanations move from the familiar thing to the unfamiliar one, in that order.Saying one thing is like another
The diagram adds something the words alone could not, which is
C. The caption is the giveaway: same person, same weight. Only a picture can hold both versions in front of you at once. Ask what the picture does that a sentence could not — here it is the comparison itself.What the heading or picture adds
‘taking up room’ is printed in bold in the first line because it is
B. Everything after it — the beach ball, the diagram, the squashing — is that phrase being unpacked. The bold marks the hinge. Ask what would be lost in plain type: here, you would not know which three words to hold on to.Marks the writer leaves on purpose
‘This is why a lifejacket is bulky and not heavy’. The writer sets those two words against each other to
A. Bulky and heavy feel like the same complaint until you put them side by side. Splitting them is the entire idea of the text, said in six words. Two adjectives joined by and not are always a contrast — find what is being separated.Setting two unlike things side by side
The last paragraph is there to
A. Squash it flat and it stops working — because a flat jacket takes up no room. The paragraph is a test of whether the idea landed, dressed up as practical advice.Why this bit is here at all
We spoke to Ines Marchetti, who has volunteered on the lifeboat at Porthgarrow for nine years.
What happens when the pager goes off?
You stop whatever you are doing. I have left a full trolley in the middle of the supermarket. I have left my own birthday cake on the table. You get eight minutes to be on the boat, so you do not finish the sentence you are in.
Is it frightening?
Going out, no. There is too much to do. Coming back is when your hands start.
What do people get wrong about the job?
They think it is all storms. Most of it is not. Most of it is somebody who took an inflatable out on a nice afternoon and did not notice the wind was behind them. Nobody plans to be rescued.
Why keep doing it?
Because the pager is going to go off whether I am in the crew or not.
Which answer proves that crew members drop everything the moment the pager sounds?
C. ‘You stop whatever you are doing’ is the claim; the cake is the proof. A birthday is the least droppable thing there is. When someone makes a claim and then gives an example, the example is what the question wants.Which quotation proves it
Which answer shows that Ines is frightened, even though she says going out is not?
B. She never uses the word frightened. She does not need to — shaking hands say it, and the fact that they wait until afterwards says more. Evidence about feelings is very often physical rather than stated.Which quotation proves it
Which answer proves that most call-outs are not dramatic rescues in storms?
D. ‘They think it is all storms’ is what other people believe, and ‘Most of it is not’ is her denying it — neither one shows you what the call-outs are. The inflatable on a nice afternoon does. A denial is not evidence; the example that replaces it is.Which quotation proves it
Ines’s answers are mostly short and plain. This makes her sound
A. She answers everything, and fully — she is simply not dramatic about it. Tone is carried by sentence length as much as by word choice, and short and plain almost always reads as calm.Whose eyes, and what tone
‘Nobody plans to be rescued.’ is included in order to
A. It comes straight after the afternoon and the inflatable — just when you were about to think well, that was their own fault. She heads that off in five words.Why this bit is here at all
The interview is titled with Ines’s own words, ‘You go when the pager goes’, in order to
D. A title in quotation marks hands the first line to the person, not the reporter — and this one contains the whole job in six words. Whenever a headline is in quote marks, ask why the writer wanted those words first.Marks the writer leaves on purpose
Every Friday. 8.10 am. Meet at the top of Cotter Hill.
A bike bus is a group of children who cycle to school together, along one route, with two adults riding at the front and back. You join at any point along the way, like a bus stop.
It is not a race and it is not a club. It is just the way we get there.
The little map is on the poster mainly to
B. The text says you join at any point along the way; the map is what makes that believable in one glance, with three marked stops between the hill and the gate. A picture on a poster is usually answering the reader’s biggest objection.What the heading or picture adds
‘Forty-one of us rode it last Friday.’ is included in order to
A. The unspoken worry about anything like this is will I be the only one? A number answers that faster than any amount of persuading. Ask what fear each line of a persuasive text is quietly settling.Why this bit is here at all
‘It is not a race and it is not a club.’ The writer says what it is not in order to
C. A race would put off anyone slow; a club would put off anyone new. Naming both and dismissing both is quicker than arguing. Saying what something is not is a real move — ask which two wrong pictures are being taken away.Setting two unlike things side by side
‘Helmets, always.’ is written without a proper verb because it
B. You should always wear a helmet can be argued with. Helmets, always. cannot. Cutting the sentence down turns advice into a condition of joining.Marks the writer leaves on purpose
‘It is just the way we get there.’ The word we matters because it
D. Every earlier line could have said you. Ending on we quietly moves the reader inside the group. Pronouns in persuasive writing are never accidental — check who is being included.Whose eyes, and what tone
The purpose of the whole poster is to
B. Everything on it — the time, the map, the forty-one, the reassurance about races and clubs — is aimed at one action. For a whole-text purpose question, ask what the writer wants you to do when you have finished reading.Why this bit is here at all
Do the whole set first. On this set especially, a wrong answer you then understand is worth more than a lucky right one.
These are the questions that feel like guessing. If one will not come, say it out loud instead — your helper knows every text here, and will not tell you the answer.
Tell it the set and the question number. Uses the microphone. Nothing is recorded.