Reading Comprehension #1

The Diver
By Ian Serraillier

I put on my aqua-lung and plunge,
Exploring, like a ship with a glass keel,
The secrets of the deep. Along my lazy road
On and on I steal –
Over waving bushes which at a touch explode
Into shrimps, then closing, rock to the tune of the tide;
Over crabs that vanish in puffs of sand.
Look, a string of pearls bubbling at my side
Breaks in my hand –
Those pearls were my breath! ... Does that hollow hide
Some old Armada wreck in seaweed furled,
Crusted with barnacles, her cannon rusted,
The great San Philip? What bullion in her hold?
Pieces of eight, silver crowns, and bars of solid gold?

I shall never know. Too soon the clasping cold
Fastens on flesh and limb
And pulls me to the surface. Shivering, back I swim
To the beach, the noisy crowds, the ordinary world.

1. What does the persona mean when he says “Exploring, like a ship with a glass
keel”?
a. He is able to see everything underwater clearly
b. He is on a boat with a glass bottom
c. He arrived at his destination on a glass boat
d. That he really enjoys exploring underwater

2. Why did the waving bushes explode into shrimps?
a. The persona is actually dreaming and he is not actually swimming
b. The shrimps were clumped together which made them look like waving
bushes
c. They were filled with shrimp which swam away when the persona
touched it
d. None of the above

3. What is the best definition for the word ‘steal’ as it is used in the poem?
a. Take
b. Crime
c. Persevere
d. Remove




4. Which of the following techniques is not used in the poem?
a. Rhetorical question
b. Enjambment
c. Rhyming
d. Textual Allusion

5. Why did the diver return to the surface of the ocean?
a. He was running out of oxygen
b. It was getting too cold
c. He had seen enough and wanted to return to the beach
d. He was pulled to the surface by some unknown force

6. The persona describes society as the ‘ordinary world’, how might he describe the
underwater world that he explored?
a. Magical and breathtaking
b. Boring and mundane
c. Confusing but interesting
d. Thought-provoking and inspiring

Reading Comprehension #2
Messy Room
by Shel Silverstein

Whosever room this is should be ashamed!
His underwear is hanging on the lamp.
His raincoat is there in the overstuffed chair,
And the chair is becoming quite mucky and damp.
His workbook is wedged in the window,
His sweater's been thrown on the floor.
His scarf and one ski are beneath the TV,
And his pants have been carelessly hung on the door.
His books are all jammed in the closet,
His vest has been left in the hall.
A lizard named Ed is asleep in his bed,
And his smelly old sock has been stuck to the wall.
Whosever room this is should be ashamed!
Donald or Robert or Willie or--
Huh? You say it's mine? Oh, dear,
I knew it looked familiar!

1. What is the main poetic technique for this text?
a. Cumulative listing
b. Alliteration
c. Assonance
d. Hyperbole

2. Which option best replaces the word ‘wedged’ as it is used in the passage?
a. Stored
b. Triangulated
c. Jammed
d. Scattered

3. Which of the following options is a false statement?
a. The persona most likely has a messy room too
b. The persona is ashamed of the rooms of his friends Donald, Robert and
Willie
c. The persona is a young child and not an adult
d. The poem is written in quite a conversational tone

4. What is the persona’s epiphany at the end of the poem?
a. That the room is more dirty than he had originally thought
b. That everyone around him actually has dirty rooms
c. That he is familiar with dirty rooms
d. That the room he is looking at is actually his




5. Which of the following items is not found in the messy room/s?
a. Clothes
b. Sports equipment
c. A pet
d. A laptop

6. What is the purpose of this poem?
a. To remind the reader to clean their messy rooms
b. To mock people with messy rooms
c. To give a humourous take on messy rooms
d. To explain how a room can get messy



Reading Comprehension #3
Detuned Radio
by T.L. Evans

My mother said she’d never known such rage
within a child, she told me later,
after the doctor, and after the pastor.
I don’t recall the nights within the cage.
I’d raise my two-foot frame against the bars
and fill the little room, my mother said,
with screaming, screaming that could wake the dead,
my fists and eyes clamped shut against the dark.
I don’t remember much till I was saved.
It was by chance her detuned radio
whose crackling plugged the quiet’s monstrous hole.
I sank beneath its filtered, whispered waves.

Still now, when silence starts to sink its gap,
I hear the desperate presence climbing up
and twitch the dial to static’s frequency.
Its hiss alone can make the thing retreat.
We used to top and tail, me and my twin.
And when the white noise stops she speaks again.

1. What is the main purpose of this poem?
a. To provide an entertaining poem that the reader will enjoy
b. To demonstrate how radios will keep children quiet
c. To show how disruptive kids are
d. To talk about the beautiful nature of the radio

2. What calmed the child down and stopped the screaming?
a. The music from the radio
b. The static of an untuned radio
c. The child’s twin
d. The cage which the child was put inside of

3. What poetic technique is used in the part “screaming that could wake the dead”?
a. Personification
b. Symbolism
c. Figurative language
d. Imagery







4. Why might have the poet chosen in particular to use the word “whispered”?
a. To show the soothing effect of the radio
b. To demonstrate that the volume was very low
c. There is no particular reason why the poet chose this word
d. To fit the rhyming scheme

5. As revealed subtly at the end of the poem, what is the primary reason for the
persona’s anguished screaming?
a. He has a mental disease
b. The radio was stopped
c. He is plagued by the haunting of a deceased twin
d. All of the above

6. What is the genre of this poem?
a. Comedy
b. Reflective
c. Romanticism
d. Horror

Reading Comprehension #4
Wasp
Douglas Stewart

Well wasp what’s
To do about you
Battering at the windscreen
You can’t get through?

World’s all wrong,
Air itself in treason
Turns a sudden solid
And shuts you in prison.

And still through the wall wasp
The long green paddocks sweeten
With trigger-flower and daisy
And gold billy-button;

But up wasp down wasp
Climb wasp and fall,
Can’t beat your way
Through the clear strange wall.

Out and away then
When the car stops;
World’s come right again
And happy goes wasp.

1. What is the rhyming scheme of the first two stanzas of this poem?
a. ABCD EFGH
b. ABAB CDCD
c. ABCB DEFE
d. ABAC DEDF

2. In what situation does the wasp find itself in, in this poem?
a. It is stuck in a house without a way out
b. It is stuck in a moving car
c. It is flying around and enjoying nature
d. It has been locked away in a glass jar prison

3. What is the ‘clear strange wall’ which is mentioned in the fourth stanza of the
poem?
a. Glass
b. The wasp’s own mind
c. A force field
d. A mirror


4. What happens to the wasp at the end of the story?
a. It hits a car and dies
b. It escapes and returns to nature
c. It enters its nest again
d. None of the above

5. Which of the following techniques is used in the poem?
a. Onomatopoeia
b. Personification
c. Simile
d. Rhetorical question





































Reading Comprehension #5
Epistle from inside the Sharknado
By Fran Lock

You might call it God; might witness the weather’s
disjointed volition, and figure it biblical payback
for all your long decades of self-defeating industry:
the gases in the atmosphere, the poison in the water.
And you might stand on your lawn in your shorts,
running a scream up a flagpole; sniffing catastrophe’s
rank surfeit on the bilious air. You might, for all I
know. For all I care you could be crouching in
rainy basements, debating plague or commies with
the cans of beans; courting immortality with forward
planning until your lungs fill up with sand like canvass
punching bags. It means nothing to me, the human
world: humourless delinquencies, the corkscrew
politics of plunder and of blame; victims of this or
that, rolling a moistened eye to camera. I see you,
surrounded by dripping debris, in the local anchor’s
sallow limelight, angling and righteous. Nuke
the sharks! It will not save you. I will come again.
We will come, seismic and genderless, thick sleeves
of meat, working the humid air like a grudge. You’d
better run. You’d better equip yourself with guns,
and chainsaws, consult a TV psychic, burn your
money, shave your head, sell your kids, anything at
all. I am coming round again. We are coming,
driven by insomnia’s deficient logics, our no-
escape velocity. You will know us by the shine
of our endangered Kevlar; my exoskeletal corset
rips your fingers into kelp. You might call it God,
but it’s not God. The sky is singing with Nature’s
maniac gusto. It’s the only game in town. Come,
hurtle over the swooning horizon, stare into my
flat-screen eye, and tell me, human, it is not so.

1. What is the main message of this passage?
a. Freak natural occurrences can happen
b. Humans will be punished for the environmental destruction
c. Humans will have to fight whatever threats go their way
d. The poem is light-hearted and does not carry a central message







2. Which of the following techniques is not used in this poem?
a. Enjambment
b. Hyperbole
c. Personification
d. End rhyme

3. From whose perspective is this poem written in?
a. A flying shark
b. God
c. Humans
d. A third person

4. Why does the poet use exaggeration in this section of the poem, “You’d better
equip yourself with guns,/ and chainsaws, consult a TV psychic, burn your/
money, shave your head, sell your kids, anything at/ all. I am coming round
again.”?
a. The Sharknado is only just an empty threat
b. People are using all sorts of methods to fight the Sharknado
c. It will be almost impossible to stop the Sharknado
d. It is unclear why the poet used this exaggeration

5. Which of the statements is true?
a. This is a poetic adaptation of a biblical story
b. According to the poem, God has sent the Sharknado
c. The humans in the poem try their best to survive the Sharknado
d. There is a war between sharks and human in this poem

6. What is the definition of the word “swooning” as it is used in the passage?
a. Mesmerising
b. Dark
c. Monotone
d. Changing

















Reading Comprehension #6
Below is a famous bush poem called “In Defense of the Bush” by Banjo Patterson

So you're back from up the country, Mister Townsman, where you went,
And you're cursing all the business in a bitter discontent;
Well, we grieve to disappoint you, and it makes us sad to hear
That it wasn't cool and shady — and there wasn't plenty beer,
And the loony bullock snorted when you first came into view;
Well, you know it's not so often that he sees a swell like you;
And the roads were hot and dusty, and the plains were burnt and brown,
And no doubt you're better suited drinking lemon-squash in town.
Yet, perchance, if you should journey down the very track you went
In a month or two at furthest you would wonder what it meant,
Where the sunbaked earth was gasping like a creature in its pain
You would find the grasses waving like a field of summer grain,
And the miles of thirsty gutters blocked with sand and choked with mud,
You would find them mighty rivers with a turbid, sweeping flood;
For the rain and drought and sunshine make no changes in the street,
In the sullen line of buildings and the ceaseless tramp of feet;
But the bush hath moods and changes, as the seasons rise and fall,
And the men who know the bush-land — they are loyal through it all.

*****

But you found the bush was dismal and a land of no delight,
Did you chance to hear a chorus in the shearers' huts at night?
Did they ‘rise up, William Riley’ by the camp-fire's cheery blaze?
Did they rise him as we rose him in the good old droving days?
And the women of the homesteads and the men you chanced to meet —
Were their faces sour and saddened like the ‘faces in the street’,
And the ‘shy selector children' — were they better now or worse
Than the little city urchins who would greet you with a curse?
Is not such a life much better than the squalid street and square
Where the fallen women flaunt it in the fierce electric glare,
Where the sempstress plies her sewing till her eyes are sore and red
In a filthy, dirty attic toiling on for daily bread?
Did you hear no sweeter voices in the music of the bush
Than the roar of trams and 'buses, and the war-whoop of ‘the push’?
Did the magpies rouse your slumbers with their carol sweet and strange?
Did you hear the silver chiming of the bell-birds on the range?
But, perchance, the wild birds' music by your senses was despised,
For you say you'll stay in townships till the bush is civilised.
Would you make it a tea-garden and on Sundays have a band
Where the ‘blokes’ might take their ‘donahs’, with a ‘public’ close at hand?
You had better stick to Sydney and make merry with the ‘push’,
For the bush will never suit you, and you'll never suit the bush.


1. What is the story about?
a. The townsman talked to the countrymen about how different their loves
are
b. A city-dweller went into rural regions and struggled to cope
c. The conversation between different Townsman about their living
conditions
d. It describes all the beauties of the outback Australia

2. Which of the following words best describes the outback as it is depicted in this
poem?
a. Harsh
b. Welcoming
c. Painful
d. Dry

3. Which of the following best replaces “perchance” as it is used in the passage
below?
a. Probably
b. Most likely
c. By coincidence
d. When

4. What poetic technique is used in the phrase “gasping like a creature in its pain”?
a. Personification
b. Simile
c. Elision
d. Exaggeration

5. The “*****” indicates the transition between the two different parts of the poem.
How does the content differ between the parts?
a. The first part talks about how Mr Townsman dislikes the countryside
while the second half talks about the delights of the countryside
b. The first part talks about the positive aspects of the countryside while the
second half talks about its negative features
c. The first part talks about the negative features of the countryside while
the second half describes its positive aspects
d. The first half is set in the early 1900s whilst the second half is set in
modern times

6. Which of the following statements is false?
a. The life in the countryside is very tough and harsh
b. The sounds of the buses and trams are much better than the music of the
bush
c. The story is set in Australia
d. The above statements are all true




7. Which of the following is true?
a. The countryside people work hard everyday to grow and make bread
b. There is tea and bands in the country side every Sunday morning
c. The countryside is at risk of urbanisation
d. The man from Sydney is unlikely to return to the countryside until it is
urbanised

8. What technique is used in the last verse of the poem?
a. Elision
b. Inversion
c. Metaphor
d. Assonance

9. Which of the following words best replaces swell as it is used in the poem above?
a. Individual
b. Current
c. Fantastic
d. City-dweller