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9th grade reading comprehension

9th grade (Year 10 in England) · 16 questions · Common Core: RL.9-10.1, RI.9-10.1, RI.9-10.2, RL.9-10.2 · England: GCSE English Language Paper 1 Q1, SAT Reading and Writing (Information and Ideas), GCSE English Language

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Question 1
Read the question and choose. "The average salary at our company is £60,000!" But the boss earns £1 million and most staff earn £25,000. What's misleading?
- A. the boss's salary is illegal
- B. averages are always accurate
- C. one huge value pulls the mean up, so it doesn't show a typical salary
- D. £60,000 is too low

Two Texts on Memory

TEXT 1 For much of the twentieth century, many people imagined memory as a kind of recording device. An experience, according to this view, was stored somewhere in the brain like a film on a shelf; remembering meant taking the film down and playing it again. Forgetting was simply the film fading with age. This model was appealing because it matched how memory often feels: vivid, detailed and certain. TEXT 2 Decades of experiments have undermined the idea that memories are fixed recordings. In one well-known type of study, participants watch a video of a car accident and are later asked how fast the cars were going when they "smashed" or when they "hit" each other. Those who heard "smashed" not only gave higher speed estimates but were more likely, a week later, to report seeing broken glass – although there was none in the video. Such findings suggest that each act of remembering is partly an act of reconstruction, shaped by later information, expectation and language. A memory can feel certain and still be wrong.

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Question 2
Read "Two Texts on Memory". What view of memory does Text 1 describe?
- A. Memory is mostly language.
- B. Memory is rebuilt each time we remember.
- C. Memory is unaffected by time.
- D. Memory works like a stored recording that is replayed.

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Question 3
Which fallacy is used here? Why worry about the factory polluting the river when there are so many more important problems in the world?
- A. straw man
- B. post hoc (false cause)
- C. appeal to false authority
- D. red herring
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Question 4
Which semantic field does the writer use here, and why? "Her ideas blossomed, took root and soon bore fruit across the whole company."
- A. war, to show conflict in the company
- B. darkness, to suggest danger
- C. growth and plants, to show her ideas developing successfully
- D. food, to suggest she is hungry
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Question 5
What word class is the word in capitals in this quotation? "the JAGGED rocks"
- A. noun
- B. verb
- C. adjective
- D. adverb
Question 6
Type the fallacy (in English) that matches this description. Twisting an opponent's argument into a weaker or more extreme version, then attacking that.
Answer
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Question 7
Which structural feature does this description of an extract show? The story begins and ends with the same line: 'The train was late again.' By the end, the meaning has changed.
- A. shift in focus
- B. cyclical structure
- C. zooming in
- D. change in pace
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Question 8
Urban foxes are often seen as pests: they tip over bins and wail at night. Yet studies suggest they also control rat populations and rarely pose a danger to people. Understanding their role may help cities manage them more humanely. Which choice best states the central idea?
- A. Urban foxes have benefits as well as drawbacks, which should shape how cities treat them.
- B. Foxes tip over bins.
- C. Rats are a growing problem in cities.
- D. Foxes are dangerous and should be removed.
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Question 9
Which technique is used here? The classroom was a furnace in July.
- A. simile
- B. personification
- C. metaphor
- D. hyperbole

The Flood

The river had been rising for three days, but in the village nobody spoke of it. People hung out washing, argued about football and queued at the bakery as if the brown water swelling beneath the bridge were simply another neighbour, loud but harmless. Nadia noticed. From her bedroom window she watched the river swallow the lowest step of the old jetty, then the second, then the third. At night she lay awake listening to it muttering against the stones, a low, endless grumble that seemed to grow hungrier by the hour. On the fourth morning, the sky was the colour of a bruise. Rain did not fall so much as hang in the air, soaking everything it touched. Nadia's grandmother, who had lived in the village for seventy years, stood at the door, sniffing the wind like an old dog. "Pack a bag," she said quietly. "Now." They were halfway up the hill when they heard it. A roar. A crack. Then silence, which was worse. Below them, the bridge had gone. Where it had stood, the river surged on, carrying fence posts, garden chairs and a single red umbrella, spinning slowly, like a flower.

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Question 10
Read "The Flood". Which technique is used in 'the sky was the colour of a bruise'?
- A. pathetic fallacy, using the sky to reflect danger and pain
- B. a rhetorical question
- C. onomatopoeia
- D. hyperbole

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.

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Question 11
Read "Should Secondary Schools Try a Four-Day Week?". How does the writer respond to the concern about childcare?
- A. says parents should stay at home
- B. ignores it completely
- C. admits it is serious, then proposes an optional supervised study day
- D. agrees that the idea should be dropped
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Question 12
Read "Should Secondary Schools Try a Four-Day Week?". Is the attendance evidence relevant and sufficient on its own to prove four-day weeks work everywhere?
- A. neither relevant nor sufficient, because pilots are always wrong
- B. completely sufficient, because twelve is a large number
- C. irrelevant, because attendance has nothing to do with school
- D. relevant, but one pilot in twelve schools is not enough to prove it works everywhere

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Question 13
In which quotation is the word in capitals this word class: adverb?
- A. "he spoke BITTERLY"
- B. "the BRITTLE leaves"
- C. "she CLUTCHED the letter"

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.

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Question 14
Read "The Gardener's Ledger". What does the single entry "Rain." in 1993 most likely suggest?
- A. that 1993 was a very dry year
- B. the father's overwhelming grief after his wife's death
- C. that he had forgotten to write
- D. that the father stopped gardening for good

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.

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Question 15
Read "Rethinking Screen Time". Why does the writer say "screen time" is "a crude measure"?
- A. Parents exaggerate the numbers.
- B. Screens are bad in every case.
- C. It is impossible to count hours.
- D. It treats very different activities as if they were the same.

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Question 16
Which technique matches this description? Giving human qualities or actions to something non-human.
- A. sibilance
- B. simile
- C. personification
- D. metaphor

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Answer key: 9th grade reading comprehension

1. C. one huge value pulls the mean up, so it doesn't show a typical salary
2. D. Memory works like a stored recording that is replayed.
3. D. red herring
4. C. growth and plants, to show her ideas developing successfully
5. C. adjective
6. straw man
7. B. cyclical structure
8. A. Urban foxes have benefits as well as drawbacks, which should shape how cities treat them.
9. C. metaphor
10. A. pathetic fallacy, using the sky to reflect danger and pain
11. C. admits it is serious, then proposes an optional supervised study day
12. D. relevant, but one pilot in twelve schools is not enough to prove it works everywhere
13. A. "he spoke BITTERLY"
14. B. the father's overwhelming grief after his wife's death
15. D. It treats very different activities as if they were the same.
16. C. personification