Reading is the section that quietly rewards years of habit. There’s no shortcut content to revise — a child who reads widely and thinks about what they read arrives well prepared, and one who doesn’t can’t make that up quickly. It appears in both the Selective and OC tests, on screen, under time.
Where it appears
- Selective Reading
- 17 questions · 45 minutes
- OC Reading
- 14 questions · 40 minutes · 33 answer points
- Text types
- Narrative, informational and poetic
- Format
- On-screen, including cloze and dropdown answers
What it tests
The Reading section moves across different kinds of writing — narrative passages, factual and informational texts, and poetry — and asks students to do more than locate facts. The core demands are:
- Inference — reading between the lines to grasp what’s implied but not stated.
- Vocabulary in context — working out a word’s meaning from how it’s used, not from a memorised list.
- Understanding structure and purpose — recognising why a text is written as it is and how its parts fit together.
Many answers can’t simply be pointed to in the passage; they have to be reasoned out from it.
The on-screen formats
Because the test is computer-based, the answers aren’t all multiple choice in the familiar sense. Students meet cloze tasks (selecting words to fill gaps) and dropdown selections embedded in the text. None of this is difficult once it’s seen, but the first encounter shouldn’t be on test day.
Reading speed and stamina
Both sections pack demanding comprehension into a tight window, so pace matters. The Selective section gives 45 minutes for 17 questions across several passages; the OC section gives 40 minutes for 14. The challenge isn’t reading fast for its own sake — it’s reading efficiently: absorbing a passage well enough, the first time, to answer without re-reading it three times. That stamina comes only from regularly reading longer texts.
Home strategies
- Read widely and daily. Mix fiction, non-fiction and the occasional poem so no text type feels foreign.
- Talk about the reading. Ask “why did the character do that?” or “what does this word mean here?” — that’s inference and vocabulary-in-context in everyday form.
- Stretch the attention span. Gradually longer texts build the stamina the timed sections demand.
- Practise in format. Once the basics are there, on-screen practice tunes pace and gets your child comfortable with cloze and dropdown answers.
Where Test Academy fits
Once the reading habit is in place, realistic on-screen practice does the rest. Test Academy’s platform offers Reading passages and questions in the true exam format, with explanations that show how each inference was reached — useful preparation that complements, rather than replaces, a child’s own reading. It also sits alongside the Writing task, where strong reading consistently pays off.