Developing Comprehension Skills
an ability to understand the meaning or importance of something (or the knowledge acquired as a result)".
Many of us will remember doing comprehension tests at school and in English classes, and many will also remember feeling frustrated at how tricky these tests could be when you first started doing them.
Comprehension skills are really about the ability to process and understand input, whether it be watching something on TV, reading a passage of text, or taking part in a conversation. Moreover, comprehension skills should enable us to answer related questions that are not directly answered by what we have read, based on the information we have gleaned.
It is the difference between simply hearing or reading, and actually understanding the information you are being provided with. It is one of the skills that makes humans unique, and a skill that it is proving notoriously difficult to teach computers due to its reliance on semantic understanding rather than being directly syntax based.
Comprehension Test
Read the following passage from my favourite Shakespeare sonnet:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.
Now answer the following questions:
1) What, in one word, is the predominant theme of this sonnet?
2) Which of these qualities of love does Shakespeare highlight in this sonnet:
a) It is unchanging
b) It is a fool
c) It results in doom
3) What would lead to man ever having loved?
4) What has a 'bending sickle's compass'?
And that's it. Did you find that difficult or easy? So that you didn't accidentally read the answers before completing the test, the answers have been encoded below. The code is simple - each letter has been shifted one, so 'a' has become 'b' and so on.
Answers
1) Mowf
2) b)
3) Jg Tiblftqfbsf jt xspoh
4) Ujnf
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