Teach your child to swap each option into the sentence and keep the one that still makes sense.
Practice test 1 is free. No card needed.
A word meaning question asks what a word means in its own sentence, which may not be the meaning your child knows best. Children in Year 5 now meet them in the ASET on 6 March 2027.
Checked by the SelectiveReady team on 12 October 2026 · Updated 27 October 2026 · How we check facts
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It quotes a word from the passage and asks what it means there. Sometimes the word is new; sometimes it's an everyday word doing a less usual job.
These three are ours, on one information text about sundials and water clocks. Two of the words, face and measured, are everyday words used in a different way.
Long before anyone owned a watch, people needed ways to divide the day. Workers had to know when to start and finish, traders when to meet, and officials how long a speech should last. The earliest solutions relied on two things that were nearly always at hand: sunlight and water.
The simplest sundial is a stick pushed upright into the ground. As the sun moves across the sky, the stick's shadow swings slowly around it: long in the morning, short at midday and long again in the afternoon. By marking where the shadow fell, people could divide daylight into parts. Later sundials were carved from stone, with a raised pointer called a gnomon to cast the shadow and lines cut into the face to show the hours.
Sundials had an obvious drawback: they were useless at night and on cloudy days. To fill the gap, people in ancient Egypt and elsewhere developed water clocks. One early kind was a stone bowl with a tiny hole near the bottom. As water dripped steadily out, the level inside fell past marks on the inner wall, each showing that a certain amount of time had passed. Other water clocks worked the opposite way, measuring time by how quickly a container filled.
Neither method was perfect. The shadow's position at each hour shifted with the seasons, and water flowed faster when a bowl was full than when it was nearly empty, so the hours were not always equal. Clockmakers spent centuries refining their designs, adjusting the shapes of bowls and the markings on dials to make them more accurate.
Even so, these early devices changed the way people lived. For the first time, a day was not only light and dark but a series of measured hours that everyone could share.
In the third paragraph, the word 'drawback' is closest in meaning to
Answer: A
Answer: A
Read what comes after the colon: sundials 'were useless at night and on cloudy days'. That is a weakness. Option C is the trap of splitting the word into 'draw' and 'back'; nothing in the sentence is moving backwards. B is the opposite of what the sentence describes.
In the second paragraph, what does the word 'face' mean?
Answer: C
Answer: C
Many words have several meanings, so check the sentence the word sits in. Lines were 'cut into the face to show the hours', so the face is the marked surface of the stone dial, as on a clock face. Option A is the most common meaning, but a stone sundial has no head.
'For the first time, a day was not only light and dark but a series of measured hours that everyone could share.' Here, 'measured' means that the hours were
Answer: B
Answer: B
'Measured' has several meanings, so test each against the passage. The devices marked how much time had passed, and 'everyone could share' the same hours, which fits B. D is the trap: the fourth paragraph says 'the hours were not always equal'. A and C are real meanings of 'measured' (a measured pace, measured words) that do not fit this sentence.
On the day, supervisors can't explain a question or say what a word means. So working a word out from its sentence is part of the test, and worth practising before it.
Let the sentence do the work: read around the word, then test each option in its place. The words nearby carry the meaning, which is why this works even for a word your child has never seen.
As you read the worked explanations, ask your child to put a wrong option into the sentence and read it aloud. Hearing it clash is the quickest way to see why it's wrong.
Find it in the passage and read its whole sentence, plus the ones before and after.
Colons, examples and contrasts can explain a word. After 'drawback' comes what sundials couldn't do.
Put each option in the word's place. The right one keeps the meaning; the others sound wrong or clash with the text.
If an option is the word's most common meaning, check it still fits here.
These traps come from the three words above. Go through them once you have read all three together, and ask which clue in the sentence each wrong option misses.
Splitting the word: 'drawback' isn't about drawing or going back. In its sentence it means a weakness.
The everyday meaning: the 'face' of a stone sundial is its marked surface, as on a clock. It has nothing to do with a head.
A meaning the passage rules out: 'measured' hours can sound like equal hours, but the fourth paragraph says the hours weren't always equal.
Talk about words inside the sentences where you find them, not from a list on their own. That's how the test asks about them.
Three worked explanations show the method. A full Reading Comprehension test, 35 questions in 35 minutes, shows how your child copes with new words inside longer texts.
Practice test 1 is free, and the results by skill show whether words in context are costing marks. Our ASET reading sample questions page has eight more worked questions, and ASET Reading explains the whole test.
Yes, after trying each option in the sentence. On the ASET there are no marks taken off for wrong answers, so leaving a question blank never helps.
Year 6 children in Perth metro, Bunbury and Albany sit it on 6 March 2027. Dates for regional WA and interstate sittings are on the ASET dates page.
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.