See what your child will read on the morning, how to pace it, and which reading skill to practise first.
Practice test 1 is free. No card needed.
Reading Comprehension opens the ASET and tests how well your child understands and interprets what they read. Children in Year 5 now sit it on 6 March 2027, for Year 7 entry in 2028.
Checked by the SelectiveReady team on 12 October 2026 · Updated 27 October 2026 · How we check facts
Independent. Not affiliated with the WA Department of Education or ACER.
It tests whether your child can make sense of a text: what it says, what it suggests and why it was written that way. The four ASET tests aim to measure problem-solving, reasoning, creative thinking in writing, comprehension, interpretation and applying known concepts to new situations, and this one leans hardest on comprehension and interpretation.
The texts can be fiction, non-fiction, poetry and drama, with diagrams, tables, charts or maps. They may come from any subject, but everything your child needs is printed on the paper, so no special subject knowledge is needed. So the habit to build is going back to the page for proof, not knowing the topic.
| What the handbook says | |
|---|---|
| Questions | 35, multiple choice |
| Time | 35 minutes |
| Options | 4, A to D |
| Suggested pace | about a minute per question |
| Wrong answers | no marks taken off for wrong answers |
It comes first: Reading Comprehension, then writing, then Quantitative Reasoning, then Abstract Reasoning. Your child goes straight from reading into writing, and the 10-minute break comes only after that.
Every test counts the same, because all 4 tests are worth the same. A hard passage early on doesn't decide the morning, so tell your child it's fine to let one go and keep reading.
Each of our Practice tests opens with a full Reading Comprehension test, at the real count and time, with 4 options per question. The texts and questions are our own, written across the ten reading skills below.
There are 15 Practice tests for this exam. Practice test 1 is free; the others need a paid plan. The real test is on paper, in pencil, so print the Department's practice paper and let your child sit it once with a pencil as well.
These three are ours, on The Solo, a short story about Ruby, a cornet player waiting to play in the park. They ask for a detail, the meaning of a phrase and what Ruby feels.
Each shows the answer and the working. Read the story with your child, then talk through the words in the text that prove each right answer.
Ruby had practised the eight bars so often that she could hear them in the hum of the fridge. Even so, when the band filed onto the rotunda in the park and she saw the crowd spread across the grass on picnic rugs, the notes seemed to slide out of her head like water through a gutter.
She sat at the end of the second row, where the cornets always sat, and fixed her eyes on the music stand. The paper fluttered in the breeze. She pinned it with a peg from her pocket, the way Mr Kowalczyk had shown her in her first week, eighteen months ago, when she had been too small to reach the stand without a cushion.
The first two pieces went by in a blur of marching rhythms. Then the bandmaster lowered his baton, and the park went quiet in that particular way that meant people were waiting.
Ruby lifted her cornet. Her lips felt as dry as paper. She glanced up and found Mr Kowalczyk watching, not her, but the drummer, as though nothing unusual were about to happen at all. It was such an ordinary look that something in her chest loosened.
She played. The first note wobbled, and she heard it wobble, and she kept going anyway. By the fourth bar the sound had steadied and grown, rolling out over the rugs and the gum trees and the café on the corner. When she lowered the cornet, a toddler near the front clapped before anyone else, and then everyone did.
Afterwards, packing up, she asked Mr Kowalczyk why he hadn't looked at her during the solo.
"Why would I watch a thing I already knew would be fine?" he said, and went to help with the drum.
Why did Ruby put a peg on her music?
Answer: C
Answer: C
Find the sentence about the peg and read the one before it. The paper 'fluttered in the breeze', so she pinned it down. Option A is tempting, but Mr Kowalczyk showed her this trick in her first week, eighteen months earlier, not right before the solo.
'the notes seemed to slide out of her head like water through a gutter.' This comparison suggests that Ruby
Answer: B
Answer: B
Ask what water running through a gutter is like: fast and impossible to hold on to. Seeing the crowd made the music she knew seem to drain away, which is nerves. Option C is wrong because the first sentence says she had practised so often she heard the music in the fridge's hum.
Why did something in Ruby's chest 'loosen' when she saw Mr Kowalczyk watching the drummer?
Answer: A
Answer: A
Look at the words right before: 'It was such an ordinary look.' Because he acted as if nothing unusual was happening, the solo stopped feeling so huge and she relaxed. Option B is tempting, but the ending shows he had not forgotten: he 'already knew' the solo would be fine.
More questions on this story and an information text are on our ASET reading sample questions page.
At about a minute per question, there's no time to reread a whole passage for every question. Reading the question first, then going back to the right part of the text, saves minutes.
Your child should leave its answer space blank and put an asterisk next to the question number, then come back if time allows.
Your child should be about halfway through the questions when half the time is left.
The handbook's tip is to narrow it to two of the four options by ruling out obvious wrong answers.
The handbook says to fill in an answer for every remaining question.
The handbook recommends answering in order, which lowers the risk of misaligned answers. If answers slip out of line, your child should not rub anything out, and tell a supervisor straight away. Rough working is fine in the question booklet, but markers never see it, so underlining in the passage costs nothing.
The handbook lists kinds of text, not question types, so these ten groups are our own. After a practice test, start with the skill that cost the most marks: each page has a method, three worked questions and the traps to check.
| Skill page | What it asks your child to do |
|---|---|
| ASET finding details questions | Find what the text says, and check every part of an option |
| ASET inference questions | Work out what the writer shows but doesn't say |
| ASET main idea questions | Say what a paragraph or whole text is mostly about |
| ASET word meaning questions | Work out what a word means in its own sentence |
| ASET tone questions | Hear how the writing sounds, and what the writer feels |
| ASET author's purpose questions | Explain why the writer wrote it that way |
| ASET missing sentence questions | Choose the sentence that fits a gap |
| ASET poetry questions | Read images, stanzas and the poet's attitude |
| ASET visual text questions | Read posters, maps and tables, small print included |
| ASET comparing texts questions | Set two texts on one topic side by side |
Supervisors can't explain a question or say what a word means. The sentences around a word hold the clues, so practise working words out from them at home.
The Department's advice is to read the handbook carefully and try the Practice ASET, and it recommends that you go through the handbook with your child before the test. Reading widely helps too: stories, news, poems and timetables. There's a calm plan in how to prepare for the GATE test.
The Department's free Practice ASET has 4 parts, including Reading Comprehension, its answers and an answer booklet, the same answer booklet your child will use on the day. The paper's year or edition is not published. Practice results do not show how a child will score.
The ASET Handbook covers how each test works and is marked, with examples, tips and answers to common questions.
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.