The National 5 exam includes Reading for Understanding, Analysis and Evaluation as part of the question paper.
This tests your ability to understand the writer‟s ideas, and to analyse and evaluate the language he/she uses to put those ideas across. You will earn marks for everything you get right.
1. You will be tested on this by sitting an exam in April/May of your National 5 year.
2. Try to read regularly a quality newspaper such as the Guardian, Scotsman, Herald, Independent or The Times.
3. Do not just read the news stories near the front, but also the feature articles and opinion pieces in the later pages.
4. Expand your knowledge of language, and of how people debate and argue about their ideas, by watching television programmes such as Question Time and Newsnight.
5. Listen to radio programmes such as Radio Scotland‟s morning news programme.
6. If you encounter unfamiliar words, see if you can work them out from the context, or look them up.
7. You will not be able to take a dictionary into the exam, so it is important to work on building up your vocabulary, and your command of ideas.
8. You will be given a non-fiction passage, perhaps a piece of journalism or an extract from a book.
9. You will have 1 hour to read the passage and answer 30 marks‟ worth of questions about it.
10. To help prepare for this, you need to ensure you can identify and discuss features of writing such as imagery, sentence structure, tone and word choice.
Use this booklet to help practice
EXTRA SAMPLE PAPERS
TEENAGE-BEDROOM (1)
