Reading Comprehension Flashcards
7 cards from real C2 practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 Reading Comprehension flashcards as text
A dense philosophical passage concludes: 'Thus the aporia remains unresolved.' An advanced reader understands 'aporia' to refer to:
Answer: A state of philosophical puzzle or irresolvable difficulty
Aporia (from Greek) denotes a state of perplexity or an irresolvable philosophical impasse or contradiction.
A passage contains the sentence: 'The policy's ostensible purpose was efficiency; its actual effect was exclusion.' The word 'ostensible' means:
Answer: Apparent or claimed but not necessarily real
Ostensible means stated or appearing to be true but not necessarily so — the claimed versus the actual purpose.
An author employs polysyndeton in a passage — for example: 'He ran and stumbled and fell and rose and ran again.' What effect does this create?
Answer: A sense of accumulated effort, relentlessness, or exhaustion
Polysyndeton (repeated conjunctions) slows the rhythm and accumulates weight, conveying relentlessness or laborious effort.
A text describes a theory as 'falsifiable.' In the context of scientific and academic writing, this means the theory:
Answer: Can be tested and potentially disproven by evidence
Falsifiability (Popper's criterion) means a theory can in principle be tested and proven wrong — a mark of scientific validity.
A literary critic writes that a novel uses 'free indirect discourse.' A C2 reader understands this technique to mean:
Answer: A narrative mode blending a character's thoughts with the third-person narrator's voice
Free indirect discourse merges a character's perspective and voice with the third-person narration, without explicit attribution.
A passage uses the phrase 'the exception that proves the rule.' At C2 level, the precise meaning of this idiom is:
Answer: An exceptional case that tests and thereby confirms the existence of a general rule
Originally from Latin legal logic, 'proves' here means 'tests' — an acknowledged exception implies a rule exists to which it is an exception.
An academic article includes a section labeled 'caveats.' A C2 reader expects this section to contain:
Answer: Warnings, limitations, or qualifications on the article's claims
Caveats are warnings or limitations that qualify or restrict the scope of claims — a standard element of rigorous academic writing.