№ 3 · Year 6 · Reading
Practice Paper 3
Calibration
Matched to the real test, question by question.
Five parts in 45 minutes — a fiction extract, a vocabulary cloze, a poem, a gapped-text passage, and a multiple-matching set — built from real, public-domain literature, the same shape as the NSW Selective Reading test. Currently in Beta and still being refined against the real test.
Every paper is generated, sat, and hand-reviewed before it is published. If a question is wrong in timing, format, or difficulty, it is rewritten. If the paper does not feel like the real test, you have thirty days to say so and ask for a refund.
— Made and reviewed in Sydney.
What you get
- OnlineAn online test mode built to feel like the real test. Timed, with a flag button, zoom, and a side panel for diagrams. Three attempts at each paper, auto-scored with a weak-spot breakdown.
- ReviewAfter each attempt, the review screen shows the correct answer and an explanation for every question.
- EmailA copy of your link, so you can return to the online test at any time.
Preview
Three questions from this paper
Pulled straight from this paper, options and all. The correct answers appear in the review screen after you sit it.
- Q1
Long before it was sweet, chocolate was a bitter drink from Central America. To the Aztecs, cacao beans were so ____ (9) that they served as money: a worker might be paid in cacao, and a handful could buy a meal. Cacao was more than money, though: the Aztecs ____ (10) the tree itself, weaving its beans into their myths and offering them to the gods.
When the Spanish carried cacao overseas, Europeans found the bitter, spicy brew unpleasant and at first ____ (11) it. Opinion changed only once cooks thought to ____ (12) the drink with sugar and honey, stripping away its harsh edge. Sweetened, chocolate swept through the royal courts, and within a generation it was the height of ____ (13): a hostess who could not offer it seemed hopelessly behind the times.
Even so, chocolate stayed a drink, never a food; the thought of eating it had never once ____ (14) anyone's mind. That changed in the 1840s, when an English firm learned to blend cocoa butter into the paste and pour it into a ____ (15), where it cooled and set hard. Out slid the first true chocolate bar. Later, milk was stirred in to soften the taste, and this final touch brought the old Aztec luxury within the ____ (16) of ordinary families.
Choose the word that best fits gap (9).
- Q2
Long before it was sweet, chocolate was a bitter drink from Central America. To the Aztecs, cacao beans were so ____ (9) that they served as money: a worker might be paid in cacao, and a handful could buy a meal. Cacao was more than money, though: the Aztecs ____ (10) the tree itself, weaving its beans into their myths and offering them to the gods.
When the Spanish carried cacao overseas, Europeans found the bitter, spicy brew unpleasant and at first ____ (11) it. Opinion changed only once cooks thought to ____ (12) the drink with sugar and honey, stripping away its harsh edge. Sweetened, chocolate swept through the royal courts, and within a generation it was the height of ____ (13): a hostess who could not offer it seemed hopelessly behind the times.
Even so, chocolate stayed a drink, never a food; the thought of eating it had never once ____ (14) anyone's mind. That changed in the 1840s, when an English firm learned to blend cocoa butter into the paste and pour it into a ____ (15), where it cooled and set hard. Out slid the first true chocolate bar. Later, milk was stirred in to soften the taste, and this final touch brought the old Aztec luxury within the ____ (16) of ordinary families.
Choose the word that best fits gap (12).
- Q3
Which writer nearly abandoned what they were doing out of sheer embarrassment, and was settled not by an order from above but by a calm word from someone their own age?