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A comprehension passage can be questioned at three levels, and knowing which level a question works at tells you what kind of answer it needs. At the first level you find what the text says, at the second you work out what it means, and at the third you judge how well it does what it sets out to do. ## Literal questions A literal question asks for something the text states. The answer is on the page, so the task is to find it, choose the right part of it and put it in your own words where the question asks for that. Typical stems ask who did something, what a writer says about a topic, or which fact a paragraph gives. The common slip is to answer from the wrong place. Questions usually point to a paragraph or to line numbers, and the answer comes from there even when the same fact is repeated elsewhere. Another slip is to lift a whole sentence when only one clause answers the question. A short, exact answer shows that you have understood which part matters. Take this short passage, written for practice. > The council promised a new bridge in 2019. By 2023 the river still had to be crossed on a rusting footbridge, and the mayor had stopped answering calls from the village. A question asking what the villagers still had to use to cross the river is literal: a rusting footbridge. A question asking how long the villagers had waited is a small calculation from the dates, which is still literal because the text supplies everything needed. Where a question says "in your own…