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In this 20-
mark question, aspirants are given a passage that is, according to FPSC’s syllabus for CSS, rich in
substance but not very technical or discipline-specific. The paragraph is followed by five questions – each
carrying 4 marks – that are to be answered by the aspirants. In this part of the series, we will discuss
some important techniques to get maximum marks from this question also.
Introduction
The word comprehension actually means ‘grasping with intellect’ and ‘understanding’. It is the ability to
read and understand a given text and to answer questions based on that. You will be presented with
passages drawn from a variety of subject areas, including humanities, sciences, latest happenings in
society, and so on. The questions following the paragraph will ask you to analyze what is stated in the
passage and would have to identify underlying assumptions and implications.
10 Steps to Follow
1. Read the passage at least twice and understand its contents well. This should not take more than five
minutes for a small and ten for a long passages.
2. Do not read the questions first. This may tempt you to look for only particular information in the
passage and consequently, affect full comprehension. It is important to first understand the passage
before you go to the questions because if the questions are not very specific, you may commit a lot of
mistakes. Generally, the passages have a mix of implied ideas and specific detail type of questions.
3. Eliminate regression, i.e., going back to the lines you have just read. This is out of habit developed over
years of wrong or half-hearted reading. This must be done away with as the maximum time you should
take to answer all the questions after reading a passage is about seven minutes. Regression is the result
of lack of concentration and assumptions.
4. Do not let your own knowledge (or lack of it) interfere with the contents of the passage. Do not make
any attempt to agree or disagree with the author.
5. Your principal task in attempting a comprehension passage should comprise:
i. Finding the topic. The topic must be precise. Generally the topic is found either in the first or in the last
line.
ii. Finding the main idea. This can be a definition, a classification, a purpose or an elaboration of the topic;
often the topic and the main idea are the same.
iii. Finding major supporting details. The supporting details modify, explain or elaborate the main idea.
You should learn to recognize these supporting details that explain, illustrate, compare and contrast,
show cause-effect relationship or merely restate the main idea in other words.
6. Underline the words you don’t know the meaning of. Try to relate them to the given context.
7. Resort to sentence analysis and break a sentence into parts, looking for answers to who, what, whom,
when, where, which, why and how.
8. Locate reference words and check what they refer to.
9. Underline signal words and look for what they indicate.
10. If the passage contains more than one paragraph, resort to paragraph analysis in the manner given
above (5 to 10).
Four Essential Steps
Step 1: The very first step is to read the questions quickly. This gives you some idea of what you should
be looking for as you read the passage.
Step 2: The second step is to read the passage at your fastest rate. The questions that have located in
your subconscious after reading the questions will force you more conscious as you come across
anything that is relevant or important if.
Step 3: Again re-read the question, one at a time. You will get some idea of the location in the passage of
material that answers the questions. If you have no ideas as to location in the passage of material that
answers the questions, go on the next question; with this step you may solve the question. Only one or
two question may be left after this step.
Step 4: Re-read the question carefully that is still unanswered. Try to find the reason. They may be
analytical in nature, requiring the analysis of a certain part of the passage. One of the most important
aspects of this is the vocabulary.
Sample Passage
Education ought to teach us how to be in love and what to be in love with. The great things of history have
been done by the great lovers, by the saints and men of science, and artists, and the problem of
civilization is to give every man a chance of being a saint, a man of science, or an artist. But this problem
cannot be attempted, much less solved, unless men desire to be saints, men of science, and artists. And
if they are to desire that continuously and consciously they must be taught what it means to be these. We
think of the man of science or the artist, if not of the saint, as a being with peculiar gifts, not as one who
exercises, more precisely and incessantly perhaps, activities which we all ought to exercise. It is a
commonplace now that art has ebbed away out of our ordinary life, out of all the things which we use, and
that it is practiced no longer by workmen but only by a few painters and sculptors. That has happened
because we no longer recognize the aesthetic activity of the spirit, so common to all men. We do not
know that when a man makes anything he ought to make it beautiful for the sake of doing so, and that
when a man buys anything he ought to demand beauty in it, for the sake of beauty. We think of beauty if
we think of it at all as a mere source of pleasure, and therefore it means to us ornament, added to things
for which we can pay extra as we choose. But beauty is not an ornament to life, or to the things made by
man. It is an essential part of both. The aesthetic activity, when it reveals itself in things made by men,
reveals itself in design, just as it reveals itself in the design of all natural things. It shapes objects as the
moral activity shapes actions, and we ought to recognize it in the objects and value it, as