Before your child picks an option, send them back to the line it came from.
Practice test 1 is free. No card needed.
Finding details questions ask what a text actually says, sometimes in different words, so each option is checked against the line. Children in Year 7 now meet them in Year 8, in the exam expected in June 2027.
Checked by the SelectiveReady team on 12 October 2026 · Updated 27 October 2026 · How we check facts
Independent. Not affiliated with the Victorian Department of Education or ACER.
ACER says Reading tests finding information in texts, and linking, interpreting, reflecting on and judging their ideas. A finding details question checks the first of these: the answer is in the text, though it may be in different words.
The questions below are ours and share one passage about the blue-banded bee, a native Australian bee. Each one shows the answer and the working, so read them together. For each option, ask your child to put a finger on the matching sentence and read the two aloud side by side.
If you spend a summer afternoon near a patch of lavender or salvia in many parts of Australia, you may notice a bee that does not look like the honey bee in picture books. It is about the same size, but it darts rather than drifts, and its abdomen is striped with bands of shimmering blue. This is the blue-banded bee, one of more than 1,500 kinds of native bee found in Australia.
Unlike honey bees, blue-banded bees do not live in hives. Each female works alone, digging a burrow into a soft clay bank or crumbling mortar and building a row of small cells at the end of it. In every cell she leaves a ball of pollen and nectar and lays a single egg; then she seals the cell and moves on. She will not meet the young bees that hatch from it.
The bees have a talent that honey bees lack. Some flowers, including those of tomato plants, hold their pollen tightly inside narrow tubes. A blue-banded bee grips the flower and vibrates its flight muscles rapidly, shaking the pollen loose in a small cloud. Scientists call this 'buzz pollination', and researchers have been studying whether these bees could help pollinate tomatoes grown in greenhouses.
At dusk, the males do something even more surprising. Instead of returning to a nest, they gather on a thin stem or a dry grass stalk, clamp on with their jaws, and fold their legs up against their bodies. Several males often share the same stem, and some return to that spot night after night, hanging there until the morning warmth wakes them.
The best way to see them is to plant blue or purple flowers in a sunny spot and to be patient. They visit each flower quickly and rarely stay long, so a gardener who looks away for a minute may miss them entirely.
Where does a female blue-banded bee make her nest?
Answer: A
Answer: A
Find the paragraph about nests, the second one, and match the words. It says each female digs 'a burrow into a soft clay bank or crumbling mortar'. Option C is a real detail from the passage, but it describes where the males sleep, not where the females nest.
Which statement about male blue-banded bees is supported by the passage?
Answer: C
Answer: C
Check every option against the fourth paragraph, word by word. It says 'some return to that spot night after night'. Option B is the trap: the males clamp on with their jaws and fold their legs up. Option D is wrong because several males often share a stem.
Which of these does the passage NOT tell us about blue-banded bees?
Answer: B
Answer: B
For a NOT question, find where each option appears, even when it is reworded. A matches 'She will not meet the young bees', C matches 'a talent that honey bees lack', and D matches the last paragraph. The passage says she lays 'a single egg' in every cell, so B is not something it tells us.
Go back to the text every time, even when the answer feels obvious. Memory blurs small words, and in these questions a small word decides the option.
These steps are ours, drawn from the working in the answers above.
Pick the words that tell you where to look, such as nest or male bees.
Find the part of the passage that matches and read it again, slowly, before looking at the options.
A small change, such as legs for jaws, makes an option wrong.
Find where each option appears in the text, even when it is reworded. The option you can't find is the answer.
If a detail won't turn up, ACER suggests your child make an informed guess and come back to it at the end if there is time.
All three traps below come from the questions above, and the same check catches each of them: find the line. Go through the list together and ask which trap would have caught your child.
Ask "Where does it say that?" about anything your child reads: a news story, a recipe, a sports report. Your child points to the exact sentence.
Copy a sentence from an article and change a word. See whether your child can spot the change. Then write a few statements about the article, including one it never says, and ask which it is.
ACER says these skills grow over time, through a culture of learning, varied engaging material and talking freely about ideas. Short, regular reading helps more than a rush before the exam.
They can look like easy marks, but going back to the text takes time. In Victoria, Reading shares one 55-minute sitting with Verbal Reasoning, so the habit has to become quick as well as careful.
Three questions show the method; a full sitting shows whether your child still checks each line when time is short. Start with Practice test 1: one full practice test with results, with a free account. Afterwards you'll see results by skill, so you can tell a reading slip from a rushing slip.
For more passages with worked answers, see VIC selective entry reading questions, or read about VIC selective entry reading.
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.
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