AEIS English — Comprehension Guide

What's inside

A three-lesson comprehension course for the AEIS Secondary paper, pitched at the harder end of Secondary 2 entry. Each lesson is a complete 90 minutes: notes, a full original passage, four or five exercises, a vocabulary quiz and set homework. Lesson 1, What the page actually says, teaches the four question types students really meet — literal, reference, own words and vocabulary in context — how the mark allocation tells you how much to write, the read-back test for pronoun reference, and how to rewrite a lifted phrase in genuine own words. Passage: The Last Ferry. Lesson 2, Reading between the lines, treats inference as arithmetic rather than guesswork — textual evidence plus ordinary knowledge equals a conclusion you can defend — and covers precise feeling words in place of sad, happy and angry, the difference between a character's mood and the writer's tone, imagery answered in two moves, and why a detail was put there at all. Passage: The Photograph. Lesson 3, The AEIS paper itself, turns to Part 2: the shape of the fifty multiple-choice questions and how to budget time across them, the habit of answering before reading the options, the five ways a wrong option is built (too broad, half true, true but not the answer, right words wrong link, outside knowledge) with three fully worked questions taking every distractor apart, and a timed fifteen-question set to be completed in twenty-five minutes. Passage: The Otters Came Back. Across the guide there are 210 items in all: 103 multiple-choice questions, 44 written comprehension questions with model answers, 42 gap and rewriting tasks and 21 matching items, plus three eighteen-mark vocabulary quizzes and three homework sets, the last of which is a timed mini-paper. All passages and questions are original LearnUp material. The student booklet runs to 41 pages; a separate answer key covering every item is available as a download below.

How to use it

Follow the method in the workbook — read aloud, cover-and-recite, check, sleep on it, recite again the next morning. One paragraph per day, six days a week, finishes the workbook in under a month. On exam day, pick the paragraph that matches the prompt's emotion, swap the marked words, add a sentence either side. Done in under a minute.