Seven Types of English Comprehension Questions

What types of questions can you expect in your English Language Comprehension paper? My analysis of past years’ ‘O’ Level papers suggests that the questions can be generally categorised into seven types:

  1. The Factual Question
  2. The Inferential Question
  3. The Use Your Own Words Question
  4. The Language Use Question
  5. Writing down/Quoting a Word/Phrase/Sentence/Expression
  6. The Vocabulary Question
  7. The Summary Question
Sometimes, however, you may find that some questions straddle two categories. For example, you may find a question that can be categorised either as a Use Your Own Words Question or a Language Use Question.


The Vocabulary Question

1.) The meaning of words

3 methods to unravel the meaning of words:

a) Using Contextual clues

  • The meaning must be the contextual meaning, rather than the usual dictionary meaning. You must look for clues within the passage that point towards the meaning of a word. These clues could include signal words (cohesive devices) which tie the text together, punctuation marks and other parts of the text that refer to the word.
  • The hero died a beautiful death.
  • beautiful here means holy, pious, inspiring, and has nothing to do with the more common meaning of attractive, splendid.
  • Gary saw the wine bottle at the corner of the room. A thought came into his mind. He could use the splinted neck to cut the rope.
  • Splinted means_______________________________

b) Analysing compound words (words with two or more words)

  • Breaking words into their componnent parts and deriving a single meaning from them.
  • Sunblock = Sun + Block(Barrier or Hindrance)
  • Meaning: barrier to the Sun
  • Earthbound
  • Look at the picture of the bird which remained earthbound……….
  • Earthbound means Ordinary

C) Taking notes of prefixes and suffixes

TAKE CAREFUL NOTE THAT:
  • THE FORM OF THE WORD GIVEN MUST BE THE SAME AS THAT OF THE GIVEN WORD.
  • THE ANIMAL SNAPPED FEROCIOUSLY AT ME
  • A WORD THAT HAS THE SAME MEANING IS FIERCELY(AND NOT FIERCE) THE PHRASE IN A FIERCE MANNER IS ALSO CORRECT.
  • THE ANIMAL ATTACKED US WITH GREAT FEROCITY.
  • THE CORRECT WORD IS NOW FIERCENESS/AGGRESSIVENESS/SAVAGERY (NOT FIERCE, AGGRESSIVE OR SAVAGE).
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