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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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Inheritance
When my aunt died she left me her piano, which was the one thing in her house I had never wanted. It was an upright of dark, scarred wood, too large for any room it had ever stood in, and it had been out of tune for as long as I could remember. As a child, I had been made to sit at it every Thursday while she counted the beats aloud in a voice like a ruler rapping a desk. I had hated it with the pure, uncomplicated hatred of a nine-year-old.
The removal men groaned it up the three flights to my flat and left it in the hall, where it blocked the light from the only window. For a month I edged around it sideways, as one edges around a guest who has outstayed their welcome. I told friends I would sell it. I photographed it twice for the listing and deleted the pictures both times.
It was during a power cut in February that I finally lifted the lid. I could not have said why. The flat was cold and dark and silent, and perhaps I simply wanted to hear something. I pressed middle C. It was flat, of course – everything about that piano was slightly flat – but the note hung in the hall far longer than I expected, and something in the slowness of its fading undid me.
I played the only piece I still knew, a dull exercise in C major that my aunt had made me repeat a hundred times. My fingers found it before my mind did. Halfway through, I realised I was counting under my breath, in her rhythm, in her voice.
I have not had the piano tuned. People ask me why, and I tell them I haven't got round to it, which is true in the way that most convenient answers are true. The other reason is harder to explain. Every flat note is exactly as she left it. I am not ready to correct her yet.
Question 1
Read "Inheritance". How does the narrator feel about the piano at the start?
- A. indifferent, having never seen it
- B. proud of its value
- C. resentful, because of unhappy childhood lessons
- D. delighted to finally own it
Question 2
We must act now. Every day we wait, another species disappears forever. This is not a problem for tomorrow. What is the writer's tone?
- A. relaxed
- B. urgent
- C. humorous
- D. uncertain
Question 3
What kind of text is this? The council voted 7–2 on Tuesday to close Mill Road to cars on Sundays from June. The change will be reviewed after six months.
- A. news report
- B. opinion piece
- C. advertisement
- D. satire
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 4
Read "The Shark on the Motorway". Why do edited images spread fastest during real emergencies, according to the article?
- A. Fact-checkers are on holiday.
- B. Phones work better in storms.
- C. People are anxious and want to warn others, so they share without checking.
- D. News sites stop working.
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". How has Daniel's feeling about the attic changed by the end?
- A. He wants to leave it immediately.
- B. It now feels full of connection rather than empty.
- C. He is now afraid of it.
- D. He thinks it is boring.
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 6
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 seeing him as concerned only with money to recognising his hidden tenderness
- C. from not knowing him to knowing only his shop
- D. from loving him to resenting him
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 7
Read "The Margin". Why does Zainab hesitate before writing?
- A. She cannot find a pencil.
- B. She is afraid of the narrator.
- C. She does not know the answer.
- D. Joining the conversation feels like speaking to strangers.
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 8
Read "Should Secondary Schools Try a Four-Day Week?". What is the writer's main claim?
- A. Secondary schools should trial a four-day week.
- B. Attendance in schools is falling.
- C. Parents need more childcare.
- D. Teenagers are always exhausted.
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 9
Read "The Attic". What mood does the writer create in paragraphs 2 and 3?
- A. light-hearted and comic
- B. bored and dull
- C. angry
- D. mysterious and tense
Question 10
The rescue centre found homes for 40 dogs this year, up from 32 last year. It still has 15 dogs waiting for owners. Which headline reports the story most accurately?
- A. Rescue centre rehomes more dogs than last year
- B. Dog rehoming falls
- C. Rescue centre empties its kennels
- D. Every dog finds a home
Question 11
Which type of conflict matches this description? A struggle against the rules, customs or beliefs of a community or government.
- A. character vs society
- B. character vs character
- C. character vs self
- D. character vs nature
Question 12
Which sentence works as this part of an argument: reason?
- A. Schools should start at 9.30 instead of 8.30.
- B. Teenagers' body clocks make it hard for them to fall asleep early.
- C. But a single hour a fortnight would be enough to teach the basics.
Question 13
What type of conflict is described? Lost in a blizzard, two hikers must build a shelter before nightfall.
- A. character vs character
- B. character vs technology
- C. character vs nature
- D. character vs self
Rethinking Screen Time
Few debates generate as much anxiety among parents as the question of screen time. Headlines warn that smartphones are "destroying a generation", while technology companies insist that their products connect and empower young people. The truth, as so often, is more complicated than either side admits.
Part of the problem is that "screen time" is a crude measure. An hour spent video-calling a grandparent, coding a game or researching a school project is not the same as an hour spent scrolling through an endless feed of short videos. Researchers increasingly argue that what young people do on screens matters more than how long they spend on them.
That said, quantity is not irrelevant. Several large studies have linked very heavy use – more than five or six hours a day of recreational screen time – to poorer sleep and lower wellbeing. Screens can displace other activities that support health: exercise, face-to-face friendship and, crucially, sleep. Light from devices and the stimulation of social media late at night can delay sleep for teenagers, whose body clocks already push them towards later bedtimes.
It is worth noting, however, that most of these studies show correlation, not causation. Teenagers who are already unhappy may turn to their phones more, rather than their phones making them unhappy. Untangling cause and effect is notoriously difficult.
What, then, should families do? Rather than fixating on a single number, experts suggest asking three questions. Is screen use getting in the way of sleep? Is it crowding out exercise and real-world relationships? And does the young person feel in control of it, or controlled by it? If the answers are reassuring, the exact number of minutes may matter less than we fear.
Question 14
Read "Rethinking Screen Time". Which word best describes the writer's tone?
- A. indifferent
- B. sarcastic
- C. balanced
- D. alarmist
Harbour at Dawn (GCSE-style extract)
The harbour did not so much wake as surrender to the morning. Fog lay over the water like a damp grey blanket that someone had forgotten to fold, and the fishing boats nodded at their moorings, half-asleep, their ropes creaking in complaint.
Old Tomas was already there. He was always there. He sat on an upturned crate at the end of the quay, mending a net with fingers that had long ago stopped feeling the cold. His knife flashed, paused, flashed again. Every so often he lifted his head and sniffed the air, as if the sea had written him a letter only he could read.
Behind him, the town stirred reluctantly. A shutter rattled up. A dog barked twice and thought better of it. Somewhere a kettle began its thin, rising whistle. The smell of bread drifted from the bakery on Water Lane and mixed with the older, deeper smells of salt, diesel and fish.
Then the sun arrived. It did not rise so much as break through – one bright blade splitting the fog, then another, until the whole harbour was suddenly ablaze. The water turned from slate to copper. Gulls exploded upward from the harbour wall, screaming. The boats seemed to sit up straighter.
Tomas did not look up. He tied off the last knot, tested it with a sharp tug, and laid the net across his knees like a sleeping cat. Only then did he raise his eyes to the brightening sea, and for a moment, just a moment, his face softened into something very close to a smile.
Question 15
Read "Harbour at Dawn (GCSE-style extract)". What impression of Tomas does the writer create?
- A. a steady, experienced man deeply connected to the sea
- B. a cheerful, talkative man
- C. a nervous newcomer to the harbour
- D. a lazy man who avoids work
Question 16
Why is this headline likely to be clickbait? This Is The End Of Football As We Know It
- A. it is a cautious summary
- B. it quotes a named source
- C. it reports a score accurately
- D. it uses dramatic exaggeration with no facts
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