The meaning of text could be explicit (literal – the words mean exactly what they say), or implicit (the words imply something that is not said directly). The meaning could be tied into a single sentence in the text – but you must also be able to connect meanings that you get from several sentences in order to come to a specific conclusion on a topic.

We use words to express our understanding, and therefore this potion also increases your vocabulary. However, the effectiveness partially depends on your writing skills as well, which involves finding the right words (even though you know them) and stringing them together. If you understand what you read, but you are not able to explain it in words when you write, the potion will not be effective. Expressing your understanding of text can vary based on the question or topic.

Sometimes…

💠…we can answer by using almost the exact words from the text (called paraphrasing) in a sentence.

💠…we need to explain the meaning of a word or phrase, which requires finding our own words.

💠…the answer is not in a specific place in the text, but spread across several sentences that we need to form an understanding and put that understanding forth – often using mostly our own words.

As seen from above, the writing aspect varies from one scenario to the next.

Obviously, the complexity of the text makes a difference with this skill – when sentences are short and the vocabulary is basic, it is much easier to understand than text with long sentences and less frequently used words.

Our quests are not grade or curriculum specific, but the aim is to master text roughly the same complexity as those used in British Schools for Grade 9 (although we do not limit text to fall in this bracket – there may be several text that exceed this level of complexity – or are simpler.)

There is no simple way to define the difficulty level of reading material. School grade standards vary from curriculum to curriculum and country to country. A better way to define it is to use global standards that are used by curriculum creators and industries worldwide. There are several online tools available that can assess a piece of text and provide the score for these standards or provide example texts. These standards are technical to understand and are given here as optional information for those that are interested:

✨Flesch Reading Ease Score: a percentage – the higher, the easier the material is to read. Your aim is to master text at a level of 60 – 70% – or lower.

✨Flesch-Kincaid Grade: A score invented based on the grade level of American schools. Your aim is to master text at a level of 10 or higher.

✨Gunning-Fox Index: metric used to measure the readability of a text, developed by Robert Gunning in 1952. It considers the number of sentences, number of words, and the number of complex words consisting of three or more syllables in the text. Your aim is to master a text level of 10 or higher.

✨CEFR Level (Common European Framework of References for Languages): Text are measured as A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2 (from easiest to hardest). Your aim is to master text at B2 level or higher.

Read the article below and answer the questions which follow.
Editorial from The Independent on Sunday newspaper, March 2014, (21st Century)
The following editorial was published in the Independent on Sunday newspaper in March 2014 to explain its decision to no longer review books aimed specifically at boys or girls.
Gender-specific books demean all our children.
A good read is just that. Ask any child, regardless of gender, says Independent on Sunday literary editor
Katy Guest.
Sugar and spice and all things nice, that’s what little girls are made of. And boys? They’re made of
trucks and trains and aeroplanes, building blocks, chemistry experiments, sword fights and guns,
football, cricket, running and jumping, adventure and ideas, games, farts and snot, and pretty much
anything else they can think of.
At least, that’s the impression that children are increasingly given by the very books that are supposed
to broaden their horizons.
An online campaign called Let Books Be Books, which petitions publishers to ditch gender-specific
children’s books, has met with mixed success recently. Last week, both Parragon (which sells Disney
titles, among others) and Usborne (the Independent Publisher of the Year 2014), agreed that they will
no longer publish books specifically titled “for boys” or “for girls”. Unfortunately, Michael O’Mara,
which owns Buster Books, pledged to continue segregating young readers according to their gender.
Mr O’Mara himself told The Independent that their Boys’ Book covers “things like how to make a bow
and arrow and how to play certain sports and you’d get things about style and how to look cool in the
girls’ book.” At the same time, he added: “We would never publish a book that demeaned one sex or
the other”.
It is not like a publisher to leave a bandwagon1 unjumped upon, but Mr O’Mara seems to have missed
a trick. Hasn’t he heard of Suzanne Collins’ multi-million-selling Hunger Games trilogy, which has a
female lead character and striking, non-pink cover designs, and is loved by boys and girls equally? For
anyone else who has missed it, the heroine, Katniss Everdeen, is rather handy with a bow and arrow
and doesn’t spend much time caring about looking cool. At the same time, Mr O’Mara should know
that telling boys they should all be interested in doing physical activities outdoors, while girls should be
interested in how they look, is demeaning to both.
There are those who will say that insisting on gender-neutral books and toys for children is a bizarre
experiment in social engineering by radical lefties and paranoid “femininazis” who won’t allow boys to
be boys, and girls to be girls. (Because, by the way, seeking equality of rights and opportunities was a
key plank of Nazi ideology, was it?) But the “experiment” is nothing new. When I grew up in the 1970s,
and when my parents grew up in the 1950s, brothers and sisters shared the same toys, books and
games, which came in many more colours than just pink and blue, and there was no obvious
disintegration of society as a result. Publishers and toy companies like to say that they are offering
parents more “choice” these days by billing some of their products as just for boys and others as just
for girls. What they’re actually doing, by convincing children that boys and girls can’t play with each
other’s stuff, is forcing parents to buy twice as much stuff.
There are also those who argue that children are set upon their boyish and girly courses from
conception, and that no amount of book-reading is going to change them. In fact, there is no credible
evidence that boys and girls are born with innately different enthusiasms, and plenty of evidence that
their tastes are acquired through socialisation. Let’s face it, any company with a billion dollar
advertising budget could convince even Piers Morgan to dress up as a Disney princess if it really
wanted to, and probably would if his doing so could double its income. So what hope is there against
all this pressure for an impressionable child?
I wouldn’t mind, but splitting children’s books strictly along gender lines is not even good publishing.
Just like other successful children’s books, The Hunger Games was not aimed at girls or boys; like JK
Rowling, Roald Dahl, Robert Muchamore and others, Collins just wrote great stories, and readers
bought them in their millions. Now, Dahl’s Matilda is published with a pink cover, and I have heard one
bookseller report seeing a mother snatching a copy from her small son’s hands saying “That’s for girls”
as she replaced it on the shelf.
You see, it is not just girls’ ambitions that are being frustrated by the limiting effects of “books for
girls”, in which girls’ roles are all passive, domestic and in front of a mirror. Rebecca Davies, who writes
the children’s books blog at Independent.co.uk, tells me that she is equally sick of receiving “books
which have been commissioned solely for the purpose of ‘getting boys reading’ [and which have] allmale characters and thin, action-based plots.” What we are doing by pigeon-holing children is badly
letting them down. And books, above all things, should be available to any child who is interested in
them.
Happily, as the literary editor of The Independent on Sunday, there is something that I can do about
this. So I promise now that the newspaper and this website will not be reviewing any book which is
explicitly aimed at just girls, or just boys. Nor will The Independent’s books section. And nor will the
children’s books blog at Independent.co.uk. Any Girls’ Book of Boring Princesses that crosses my desk
will go straight into the recycling pile along with every Great Big Book of Snot for Boys. If you are a
publisher with enough faith in your new book that you think it will appeal to all children, we’ll be very
happy to hear from you. But the next Harry Potter or Katniss Everdeen will not come in glittery pink
covers. So we’d thank you not to send us such books at all.