Comprehension

What Question 1 asks

Twenty marks. One text — Text A, a piece of reflective non-fiction. A series of sub-questions that begin by asking you to point and end by asking you to judge.

The shape of the question

Cambridge does not publish a fixed sub-question structure, and it varies between series. What is fixed is the total — 20 marks — and the objectives, which from 2027 are all five: R1, R2, R3, R4 and R5. What that means in practice is a ramp. The opening parts are worth one or two marks and can be answered by locating information. The closing parts are worth three or more and require you to explain, to analyse, or to evaluate. Reading the mark allocation is therefore not administration — it is the instruction telling you how much thinking the examiner has paid for.

The single most valuable habit

Before writing anything, underline the command word and circle the mark allocation. Then count your points on your fingers as you write. It sounds childish. It is worth several grades a year.

Explicit meaning · R1

The easiest marks on the paper, and the ones most often thrown away — not through misreading, but through answering a question nobody asked.

Two traps, both avoidable

The first is over-answering. A one-mark question wants one thing. Writing three sentences does not earn more; it costs time you will need at Question 4, and if one of those sentences is wrong it may cancel the point you had already made.

The second is lifting. When a question says using your own words, the examiner is testing whether you understood the phrase, and the only way to prove that is to replace it. Repeating it proves nothing.

Worked example — own words, two marks

The narrator of Text A, now grown, is recalling his teenage self working in his grandfather’s bookshop: "I was fluent in the language of viability that summer" (paragraph 7). Explain, in your own words, what the writer means by this phrase. [2]

Step 1. Identify the two components. Fluent carries the idea of easy, confident command. The language of viability means the vocabulary of whether a business can survive.

Step 2. Replace both, do not repeat either. "Fluent" cannot become "he was fluent"; "viability" cannot become "viable".

Step 3. Note the implication the phrase carries — he used it easily, perhaps too easily, without having earned it.

Implicit meaning · R2

Inference is not guessing. It is reasoning from evidence, and the evidence must appear in your answer.

The anchor rule

Every inference has two halves: the claim — what you think the text implies — and the anchor, the detail that permits you to think it. Claim without anchor is opinion; anchor without claim is quotation. Both score badly.

In Text A, the narrator recalls telling his grandfather the shop was not commercially viable: "He would nod slowly, thank me for thinking about it, and then go on doing exactly as he had always done, which I took, at the time, for stubbornness." Nothing states the grandfather’s feeling. Yet three things are implied, each anchored: he is unoffended (thank me); unmoved (exactly as he had always done); and misread — at the time concedes a later reading exists.

Worked example — inference, three marks

Explain what the reader learns about the narrator’s feelings towards his grandfather in paragraph 3 of Text A. Support your answer with details from the text. [3]

Step 1. Three marks means three separate feelings — not one feeling described three ways.

Step 2. Locate the anchors: "faintly ashamed"; "not of him, but of my own certainty"; "I had already decided the ending".

Step 3. Convert each anchor into a distinct claim, named precisely. Ashamed is not embarrassed, and the text specifies where the shame is directed.

Judgement · R3 and R4

From 2027, a comprehension question can ask you to judge the writer, and to explain how the writing works on you. This is new. It is also where the top of the mark range now lives.

R4 — the three-step move

Every effective analysis of effect does the same three things in the same order. Skip the third and the answer stalls in the middle bands: quote small — one word, or a short phrase, never a whole sentence; say what it literally means in this context; say what it does to the reader — the connotation, the association, the feeling produced. This is the marked step.

Text A closes: "…a street that was quietly forgetting what he was for." Quote: forgetting. Literally, the street no longer has a use for a bookshop. But forgetting is a human verb given to a street — it makes the neglect feel passive and blameless rather than cruel, which is precisely why the sentence is sad rather than angry. And quietly removes even the drama of a decision. Nobody chose this. It simply stopped being remembered.

R3 — judgement, with support

An evaluation question invites you to take a position. It does not invite you to be vague. "Some people might think..." is not a judgement; it is an evasion, and examiners read it as one.

Selection · R5

R5 is the objective nobody revises, because it does not look like a skill. It is: the discipline of leaving things out.

The three instructions that bind you

01 The paragraph reference. "In paragraph 4…" means only paragraph 4. A brilliant point from paragraph 7 scores nothing. 02 The number. "Give two reasons" means two. The examiner marks the first two offered — so put your strongest first, and stop. 03 The focus. If the question asks why the narrator admired his grandfather, reasons he doubted him are irrelevant, however true.

Timing, honestly

Paper 1 runs two hours and carries 80 marks. Fifteen minutes belong to reading. That leaves 105 minutes for 80 marks — a shade over a minute a mark. Question 1 is worth 20, so it is worth roughly 25 minutes, and not a minute more. The candidate who spends forty minutes perfecting Question 1 has not been thorough — they have quietly decided to abandon Question 4, which is worth exactly the same.