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7th grade reading comprehension
7th grade (Year 8 in England) · 16 questions · Common Core: RL.7.4, RI.8.4, RL.7.3, RL.8.3 · England: KS3 Reading, GCSE English Language Paper 1 Q2, GCSE English Language Paper 1 Q4
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Question 1
Which sentence works as this part of an argument: reason?
- A. Teenagers' body clocks make it hard for them to fall asleep early.
- B. Yet fewer cars on the road would actually mean less traffic for everyone.
- C. Every pupil should learn to cook at school.
Should Secondary Schools Try a Four-Day Week?
Imagine a school week that ends on Thursday afternoon. For students in a growing number of schools around the world, this is no longer a fantasy. I believe secondary schools should at least trial a four-day week.
The strongest reason is wellbeing. Many teenagers report feeling exhausted by the end of the week, and a longer weekend could give them time to rest, exercise and pursue interests that school leaves no room for.
Supporters also point to attendance. In one regional pilot involving twelve schools, attendance rose by three percentage points after the change. That may sound small, but across a year it adds up to thousands of extra lessons attended.
Critics argue that working parents would struggle with childcare on the fifth day. This is a serious concern. However, schools could offer an optional supervised study day, run by staff and volunteers, so that no family is left without support.
Others worry that students will learn less. Yet schools in the pilot lengthened each remaining day by forty minutes, so total teaching time hardly changed.
A trial costs little and teaches us a lot. If it fails, we can change back. If it works, students will thank us for it.
Question 2
Read "Should Secondary Schools Try a Four-Day Week?". What is the writer's main claim?
- A. Parents need more childcare.
- B. Secondary schools should trial a four-day week.
- C. Teenagers are always exhausted.
- D. Attendance in schools is falling.
Question 3
The empty swing creaked in the wind. Grey rain fell on the abandoned playground, and the last leaves dropped from the trees. What is the mood?
- A. exciting
- B. playful
- C. melancholy (sad and lonely)
- D. joyful
Speech: Our Beach, Our Responsibility
Good morning, everyone. Last Saturday, twenty-three pupils from this school spent three hours on Sandy Bay beach. We collected forty-one bags of rubbish. Forty-one. Bottles, crisp packets, fishing line, a shoe, and – I promise you this is true – an entire garden chair.
Now, I know what some of you are thinking. "It's not my rubbish. Why should I pick it up?" And you're right: most of us didn't drop it. But here's the thing. The seal pup that gets tangled in that fishing line doesn't care whose fault it was. The toddler who cuts her foot on broken glass doesn't care either.
That beach belongs to all of us. We swim there in summer. We walk our dogs there in winter. Some of us learned to ride our bikes on the promenade. If it belongs to all of us, then looking after it belongs to all of us too.
So I'm asking you for just one thing. Not money. Not your whole weekend. Just two hours, on the first Saturday of next month. Bring gloves, bring a friend, bring your little brother if you have to.
Because if twenty-three of us can fill forty-one bags, imagine what four hundred of us could do.
Thank you.
Question 4
Read "Speech: Our Beach, Our Responsibility". Why does the speaker repeat "Forty-one" on its own?
- A. to tell a joke
- B. to emphasise how much rubbish there was
- C. because she made a counting mistake
- D. to show she is unsure
The Attic
The attic door had been painted shut for as long as Daniel could remember. His mother said there was nothing up there but dust and old suitcases. So when the decorators scraped away the paint on the first Saturday of the summer holidays, Daniel was the first one up the narrow stairs.
The air was thick and warm and smelt of mothballs. Thin blades of light slid through gaps in the roof tiles and lay across the floorboards like fallen swords. In the far corner, beneath a sheet greyed with age, something waited.
Daniel crossed the room slowly. Each board groaned beneath him as if complaining about being woken. He reached out, hesitated, then pulled the sheet away in one quick movement.
It was a desk – small, battered, and covered in carvings. Initials. Dates. A crooked drawing of a sailing boat. And there, in the corner, carved more deeply than all the rest, were three letters he knew better than his own name: D.A.M.
Daniel Adebayo Mensah. His grandfather. The grandfather who had died two years before Daniel was born, and whom his mother never spoke about.
He ran his fingers over the letters. Downstairs, someone switched on a radio, and a burst of music floated up through the floor. Daniel did not move. For the first time, the silence in the attic did not feel empty. It felt like someone waiting to tell him a story.
Question 5
Read "The Attic". What mood does the writer create in paragraphs 2 and 3?
- A. light-hearted and comic
- B. mysterious and tense
- C. bored and dull
- D. angry
Question 6
At the start of the year, Leo refused to join any club. By June, he was captain of the chess team and organising the school tournament. How does Leo change?
- A. He stops liking chess.
- B. He does not change.
- C. He goes from withdrawn to confident and involved.
- D. He becomes lazier.
The Attic
The attic door had been painted shut for as long as Daniel could remember. His mother said there was nothing up there but dust and old suitcases. So when the decorators scraped away the paint on the first Saturday of the summer holidays, Daniel was the first one up the narrow stairs.
The air was thick and warm and smelt of mothballs. Thin blades of light slid through gaps in the roof tiles and lay across the floorboards like fallen swords. In the far corner, beneath a sheet greyed with age, something waited.
Daniel crossed the room slowly. Each board groaned beneath him as if complaining about being woken. He reached out, hesitated, then pulled the sheet away in one quick movement.
It was a desk – small, battered, and covered in carvings. Initials. Dates. A crooked drawing of a sailing boat. And there, in the corner, carved more deeply than all the rest, were three letters he knew better than his own name: D.A.M.
Daniel Adebayo Mensah. His grandfather. The grandfather who had died two years before Daniel was born, and whom his mother never spoke about.
He ran his fingers over the letters. Downstairs, someone switched on a radio, and a burst of music floated up through the floor. Daniel did not move. For the first time, the silence in the attic did not feel empty. It felt like someone waiting to tell him a story.
Question 7
Read "The Attic". How has Daniel's feeling about the attic changed by the end?
- A. He thinks it is boring.
- B. It now feels full of connection rather than empty.
- C. He wants to leave it immediately.
- D. He is now afraid of it.
Two Views on Zoos
TEXT A – "A Lifeline for Wildlife"
Modern zoos are not the cramped menageries of the past. The best of them are centres for conservation, research and education. Breeding programmes in zoos have helped save species such as the Arabian oryx and the California condor from extinction, and some animals bred in zoos have been successfully returned to the wild. For millions of children who will never visit a rainforest or a savannah, seeing a living animal up close can spark a lifelong love of nature. Closing zoos would not free animals; it would abandon them.
TEXT B – "Wild at Heart"
No enclosure, however large, can replace a wild home. An elephant may walk dozens of kilometres a day in the wild; in a zoo, it may cover a fraction of that, and some show repetitive swaying or pacing that scientists link to stress. While a few breeding programmes have succeeded, most animals in zoos belong to species that are not endangered at all. If we truly want to protect wildlife, our money would do far more good protecting habitats where animals already live.
Question 8
Read "Two Views on Zoos". What does the phrase "it would abandon them" suggest in Text A?
- A. Animals want to leave zoos.
- B. Zoos are like prisons.
- C. Closing zoos would leave animals without care or protection.
- D. Children would stop visiting.
Question 9
Which type of conflict matches this description? A struggle inside a character's own mind, such as fear, guilt or a hard decision.
- A. character vs self
- B. character vs character
- C. character vs technology
- D. character vs society
Question 10
Why is this headline likely to be clickbait? Number 7 On This List Will SHOCK You
- A. it summarises the main fact
- B. it shows where the list comes from
- C. it is a neutral label
- D. it promises a shock to keep you clicking
The Shark on the Motorway
During a storm last spring, a photo exploded across social media. It showed a large shark swimming beside cars on a flooded motorway. Within hours it had been shared more than 80,000 times, often with captions such as "Stay indoors — sharks in the streets!"
Fourteen-year-old Amira Haddad saw the photo in her family group chat. Something felt wrong. "The shark looked too sharp compared with the blurry water," she said. "So I decided to check."
First, Amira ran a reverse image search. She found the same shark in a wildlife photo published years earlier, on a website about ocean animals. Next, she checked two local news sites. Neither mentioned sharks; both reported flooding and road closures. Finally, she found an article from a fact-checking organisation explaining that the image had been edited and had appeared during several different storms in different countries.
Amira posted the fact-check in the group chat. "My uncle had already shared the photo," she laughed. "He was embarrassed, but he thanked me."
Fact-checkers say edited images spread fastest when they are shocking and arrive during real emergencies, when people are anxious and want to warn others. Their advice is simple: pause before you share, look for the original source, and check whether reliable outlets are reporting the same thing.
Question 11
Read "The Shark on the Motorway". Which headline best fits this article?
- A. Teen uses simple checks to expose viral storm photo
- B. Uncle bans phones in family chat
- C. Social media to close after storm
- D. Sharks invade city during storm
Question 12
Read "The Shark on the Motorway". Why do edited images spread fastest during real emergencies, according to the article?
- A. People are anxious and want to warn others, so they share without checking.
- B. Fact-checkers are on holiday.
- C. Phones work better in storms.
- D. News sites stop working.
The Margin
Zainab had read the library book three times before she noticed the handwriting.
It was in the margin of page 112, so faint she had taken it for a smudge. In tiny, slanted letters, someone had written: "Don't trust the narrator." Underneath, in different ink and a rounder hand, someone else had replied: "Why not?" And beneath that, in the first writer's slant: "Read chapter 9 again."
She read chapter 9 again. Then she read it a fourth time, and a fifth, and on the sixth she saw it – a single sentence where the narrator claimed to have been at home when, three chapters earlier, he had described himself on a train. A lie, hidden in plain sight. The whole story tilted, like a picture knocked crooked on a wall.
Zainab sat back. She checked the date stamps on the card inside the front cover. The book had been borrowed forty-seven times since 1994. Somewhere among those forty-seven readers were two people who had held a conversation across years without ever meeting.
She found a pencil. For a long time she hesitated over the page, feeling as if she were about to speak in a room full of strangers. Then, carefully, beneath the other two, she wrote: "Found it. Thank you."
When she returned the book, the librarian frowned at the pencil marks. Zainab apologised. But as she walked home, she wondered who would be next to find them.
Question 13
Read "The Margin". Why does Zainab hesitate before writing?
- A. Joining the conversation feels like speaking to strangers.
- B. She cannot find a pencil.
- C. She is afraid of the narrator.
- D. She does not know the answer.
The Gardener's Ledger
My father kept two books. The first was the ledger in which he recorded every coin that passed through the shop: the price of flour, the cost of the new awning, the debts that customers swore they would settle by Friday. He wrote in it every evening, in a small, upright hand, and he never let anyone else touch it.
The second book I did not discover until after he died. It was a cheap school exercise book, its cover soft with handling, hidden at the back of the shed behind the seed trays. Inside, in the same upright hand, he had recorded something quite different: the date the first snowdrop appeared each year; the night a fox had dug up the tulips; the morning, in 1987, when "M. laughed at the robin on the spade and said it was the bravest bird in England." M. was my mother. I had never heard my father mention her laugh.
For forty years, it seemed, he had been keeping accounts of another kind – of small, unprofitable things that added up to a life. The shop ledger balanced to the penny. The garden book did not balance at all. There were gaps of months, sometimes years. In 1993, the year my mother died, there is only one entry: "Rain."
I used to think my father was a man who cared only for what could be counted. I sat in that cold shed until the light went, reading his small, careful sentences, and understood that I had been reading the wrong book.
Question 14
Read "The Gardener's Ledger". How does the narrator's view of the father change?
- A. from respecting him to pitying his business skills
- B. from loving him to resenting him
- C. from not knowing him to knowing only his shop
- D. from seeing him as concerned only with money to recognising his hidden tenderness
Question 15
What type of conflict is described? The school's new AI timetable system locks every student out of the building, and Kai must shut it down.
- A. character vs self
- B. character vs society
- C. character vs technology
- D. character vs nature
The Margin
Zainab had read the library book three times before she noticed the handwriting.
It was in the margin of page 112, so faint she had taken it for a smudge. In tiny, slanted letters, someone had written: "Don't trust the narrator." Underneath, in different ink and a rounder hand, someone else had replied: "Why not?" And beneath that, in the first writer's slant: "Read chapter 9 again."
She read chapter 9 again. Then she read it a fourth time, and a fifth, and on the sixth she saw it – a single sentence where the narrator claimed to have been at home when, three chapters earlier, he had described himself on a train. A lie, hidden in plain sight. The whole story tilted, like a picture knocked crooked on a wall.
Zainab sat back. She checked the date stamps on the card inside the front cover. The book had been borrowed forty-seven times since 1994. Somewhere among those forty-seven readers were two people who had held a conversation across years without ever meeting.
She found a pencil. For a long time she hesitated over the page, feeling as if she were about to speak in a room full of strangers. Then, carefully, beneath the other two, she wrote: "Found it. Thank you."
When she returned the book, the librarian frowned at the pencil marks. Zainab apologised. But as she walked home, she wondered who would be next to find them.
Question 16
Read "The Margin". "The whole story tilted, like a picture knocked crooked on a wall." What does this simile show?
- A. The book fell off the shelf.
- B. Her understanding of the story suddenly shifted.
- C. The library was badly decorated.
- D. She felt dizzy and ill.
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