See what the Reading part asks, how its sitting runs, and which skill to practise first.
Practice test 1 is free. No card needed.
Reading asks your child to find, link and judge ideas in texts, and it shares a sitting with Verbal Reasoning. Children in Year 7 now sit it in Year 8, in the exam expected in June 2027.
Checked by the SelectiveReady team on 12 October 2026 · Updated 3 November 2026 · How we check facts
Independent. Not affiliated with the Victorian Department of Education or ACER.
ACER, which runs the exam, says Reading tests finding information in texts, and linking, interpreting, reflecting on and judging their ideas. In plain words: find it, connect it, then judge it.
Locate the line that answers the question. Go back to the text; don't answer from memory.
Put two parts of the text together and say what they mean side by side.
Decide what the writer thinks, how sure they are, and how well the text makes its case.
Under all three sits one habit: answer from what the words say, not from what seems likely. The knowledge needed is no more than the Year 8 curriculum, so this is about reading closely, not knowing more.
Reading comes second, after a 20-minute break. It shares 55 minutes with Verbal Reasoning, then a 5-minute short break leads into Writing.
The exam is on paper: answers shaded in a supplied answer booklet. ACER doesn't publish how many questions each part has, so there is no set time per passage.
If a question stalls, ACER suggests your child make an informed guess and come back to it at the end if there is time. It also says half the questions correct is not unusual, and many children don't finish. So pace is worth practising: a sitting at home shows whether your child finishes, and where the time goes.
This mix of texts and questions is ours, not an official ACER list. We write our own passages: stories, information texts, poems, posters and cartoons, and pairs of short texts on a shared theme.
Each question asks a single kind of thing. It might be a detail, something the text suggests, the main idea, a word in its place, the tone, why the writer made a choice, or where a missing sentence fits.
Every answer in our questions can be proved from the passage. So the habit to build is pointing to the words that prove it.
This is our own information text, written in ACER's published style, not taken from ACER. Read it with your child, then talk through the three questions: each shows the answer and the working.
In the 1860s, news from Britain reached the Australian colonies by ship, and it was always old. A report of an election or a change in prices in London might take six weeks or more to arrive, by which time events had moved on. Merchants guessed, governments waited, and families learnt of births and deaths long after they had happened.
The telegraph offered a cure. A message tapped out as electrical pulses could travel along a wire almost instantly, and by 1870 an undersea cable was planned to link Java with the northern coast of Australia. The question was how to carry the signal from there to the cities of the south, across more than 3,000 kilometres of country that few colonists had crossed.
South Australia's Superintendent of Telegraphs, Charles Todd, argued that his colony should build the line, and in 1870 work began from both ends. The planners had underestimated almost everything. Wet-season floods in the north washed away tracks and spoilt supplies; in the dry centre, teams hauled water as well as wire. Wooden poles were attacked by termites, and many were later replaced with iron ones. A signal also weakened over long distances, so repeater stations had to be built along the route, each one staffed by operators who lived for months at a time far from any town.
In August 1872 the last gap in the line was closed, and soon a message could travel from Adelaide to London within a day rather than weeks. The change was hard to overstate. Australian traders could now follow wool and wheat prices in Britain from one day to the next; newspapers printed overseas news while it was still news.
Yet the line's greatest effect may have been one that its builders did not set out to achieve. Before 1872, each colony had kept its face turned towards London more than towards its neighbours. A single wire strung through the heart of the continent, with operators listening at lonely stations all along it, made the continent itself feel, perhaps for the first time, like one place.
What is the passage mainly about?
Answer: C
Answer: C
Find the idea that every paragraph supports. The passage moves from the problem (slow news), to building the line, to its effects. Only option C covers all of that. Options B and D are details from single paragraphs, and Charles Todd is mentioned only once.
Why does the writer begin by describing how news reached the colonies in the 1860s?
Answer: A
Answer: A
Ask how the opening connects to what follows. The second paragraph begins 'The telegraph offered a cure', so the first paragraph sets up the problem of old news. Option C picks up the words 'governments waited', but that sentence is about waiting for news, not about deciding to build the line.
The writer says the line's greatest effect 'may have been one that its builders did not set out to achieve'. What does the writer mean?
Answer: D
Answer: D
Compare the purpose in the second paragraph with the effect in the last. The line was built to carry the Java cable's messages south, linking the colonies with Britain; the unplanned effect was that colonies facing London began to feel part of 'one place'. Option C reverses the plan and the result. Option A is a stated benefit, but the writer never calls it the greatest or unplanned.
They cover the main idea, the writer's purpose and an inference. For each one, ask your child to find the line in the passage that proves the right answer. For a story passage as well, see VIC selective entry reading questions.
Each skill page has its own passage and worked questions on that skill, from easier to harder. Start with the skill that cost the most marks in a practice sitting, not the one that sounds hardest.
| Skill page | What it asks | The habit that helps |
|---|---|---|
| Finding details questions | What the text says | Go back to the line every time |
| Inference questions | What the text suggests but doesn't say | Point to the clue |
| Main idea questions | What the whole passage is about | Say the point before reading the options |
| Word meaning questions | A word or phrase in its place | Guess from the sentence first |
| Tone questions | How the writer or a character feels | Match the strength of the words |
| Author's purpose questions | Why the writer made a choice | Name the job of the whole text |
| Missing sentence questions | Where a sentence or paragraph fits | Read both sides of the gap |
| Poetry questions | Images, sound and the turn in a poem | Join the opening to the ending |
| Visual text questions | Posters, cartoons and layout | Read the notes and small print first |
| Comparing texts questions | Where writers agree and where they differ | Sum up each text before comparing |
ACER says the skills the exam measures grow over time, through a culture of learning, varied engaging material and talking freely about ideas. For reading, that means ordinary family habits, kept up over months rather than crammed.
Read a mix each week, such as news, essays, poems and older novels
Ask what a text says, then what it suggests, and point to the words
Look up an unfamiliar word and try it in a sentence of your own
After a wrong answer, find the line that proves the right one
NSW sets Reading as its own test on a computer. Victoria puts it in a paper sitting with Verbal Reasoning, so the clock covers both. See the NSW Selective reading test if you are weighing both.
| Victoria | NSW Selective | |
|---|---|---|
| Time and questions | 55 minutes with VR; counts not published | 17 questions in 45 minutes |
| How it's sat | On paper | On computers provided by the Department |
No. Reading is about understanding texts, while VIC selective entry verbal reasoning is about thinking and reasoning with words, concepts and logic. They share one sitting and one clock.
No, they are ours. On its Prepare page, ACER offers a set of sample questions to download, for the style and format of the exam questions. For the whole sitting under the real time, try our VIC selective entry practice tests; afterwards you'll see results by skill, so you know which skill page to open first.
Practice test 1 marks every answer and shows results by skill: what your child already does well and the three skills to work on next.
Practise for the real test
Practice test 1 is free. Then packs from A$109 for 12 months, or A$9 a week, per exam.