What is reading comprehension?

What is reading comprehension?

• A. Understanding the text by forming mental images, predicting, and asking questions.
• B. Recalling the author’s background and biography.
• C. Skimming the text quickly to find main ideas.
• D. Memorizing a list of vocabulary words.

Answer: (C)

Understanding reading comprehension means grasping what the text means as a whole—how ideas fit together, what the author is trying to communicate, and how details support that meaning. The best description among the options is that you skim the text quickly to find the main ideas. This helps you see the big picture, the structure, and what’s most important, which sets up you to understand and discuss the passage effectively. The other choices touch on parts of reading—like recalling the author's background, memorizing vocabulary, or using strategies such as forming mental images, predicting, and asking questions—but they don’t define what comprehension primarily aims to do: capture the main ideas and how the text is organized.

Understanding reading comprehension means grasping what the text means as a whole—how ideas fit together, what the author is trying to communicate, and how details support that meaning. The best description among the options is that you skim the text quickly to find the main ideas. This helps you see the big picture, the structure, and what’s most important, which sets up you to understand and discuss the passage effectively. The other choices touch on parts of reading—like recalling the author's background, memorizing vocabulary, or using strategies such as forming mental images, predicting, and asking questions—but they don’t define what comprehension primarily aims to do: capture the main ideas and how the text is organized.