NSW Selective Reading Test: 45 Minutes, 38 Answers, and the Matching Half Nobody Warns You About

Ask most parents what the Reading section of the selective test involves and you'll hear "comprehension questions". That's half right. The other half of the paper works differently, and a child who has only ever practised the standard four-option question can lose a lot of marks there without ever finding it hard.

Here is what the section looks like, taken from the Department's own practice papers rather than from what gets passed around at the school gate.

The numbers

The Reading test runs for 45 minutes. That's the longest section of the four, and five minutes longer than Maths or Thinking Skills.

The Department's website describes it as 17 questions, three of which have multiple parts. Open the practice paper itself and you'll see why that description confuses people: the paper is numbered 1 to 38, and the cover says, in plain words, "You have 45 minutes to complete 38 questions in this question paper."

Both are true. The 17 is a count of texts and question groups. The 38 is how many answers your child has to give. When you're planning practice, 38 is the number that matters, because that's what the clock is being divided by. It works out to a little over a minute per answer, before you take away time for reading the texts.

Like every section, Reading is worth 25% of the overall score. Since 2025 the four sections have carried equal weight, so a weak Reading result can't be hidden behind a strong Maths one.

The two halves of the paper

The instructions on the practice papers split the 38 answers into two kinds.

Questions 1 to 22 are the ones everybody expects: read a text, then "circle the one correct answer A, B, C or D". Some of the questions are about what the text plainly says, some ask what a word means in context, and some ask what the writer is suggesting without stating. This is ordinary comprehension, just with texts that are pitched above what a typical Year 6 reader sees at school.

Questions 23 to 38 use a different instruction: "write the correct letter in the numbered space". These are matching questions. Instead of one text with questions underneath, your child is given a set of options labelled with letters and has to place each one correctly. The two common shapes are matching short statements to the text they describe when several short texts are given side by side, and putting removed sentences or paragraphs back into the gaps they were taken from. Look at the official practice papers to see exactly how the current set lays them out.

Sixteen of the 38 answers, so a little over 40% of the section, come from this matching half.

Why the matching half catches children out

It isn't harder in the sense of needing bigger words. It's harder because the skills are different, and most children have never been taught them.

• You can't answer one at a time. In a gapped text, the sentence that fits gap 3 depends on what you've already put in gap 2. If a child places one option wrongly, it usually costs two marks rather than one. Good readers work through the whole set, place the obvious ones first, and come back to the rest.
• The clues are in the joins. A missing sentence is found by what comes just before and just after the gap: a pronoun with nothing to refer to, a "however" that needs a contrast, a "this" that needs a thing. Children who read for the gist skate straight past these.
• Don't rely on "the one that's left over". Matching sets often carry an extra option that fits nowhere. The last gap needs the same checking as the first.
• The clock feels different. By question 23 your child has been reading intensively for twenty-plus minutes. The matching questions come when concentration is at its lowest and the format is at its least familiar.

What the texts are like

The Department doesn't publish a syllabus for the Reading test, and it's careful to say the test measures ability rather than what was taught in class. The practice papers are the best guide. They use a mix of fiction extracts, non-fiction pieces and other text types, generally with vocabulary and sentence structures a couple of years above what most Year 6 children read for pleasure.

That's the point. A child who reads widely and regularly, and who has read some things that were slightly too hard for them, walks in with the main skill the section is testing. No amount of technique makes up for a child who stalls on the vocabulary.

How to practise at home

Start with the official practice papers. The Department publishes three full sets, with answers, on its practice tests page. They are free, they're the real format, and they're the only material that comes from the people who set the test. Do one of them untimed first, so your child meets the matching questions without the clock. Do the next one timed.

Teach the gap-fill method explicitly. Read the whole passage once. Read the options once. Fill the gaps you're sure of. For each remaining gap, read the sentence before and the sentence after out loud and ask what the missing sentence has to do: introduce someone, explain a "but", answer a question. Then check that every pronoun in the chosen option has something to point back to.

Practise reading on a screen. The real test is computer-based. Reading a long passage on a screen, scrolling back to check a detail, is a slightly different skill from reading on paper, and it's worth doing some of the practice that way.

Keep the reading habit going. Twenty minutes of reading most days, with some of it a notch above comfort level, does more for this section than any drill. Newspaper features, longer fiction, a well-written non-fiction book on something your child is already interested in. Talk about what they read. Ask what a word probably means from the sentence around it.

Don't let Reading become the neglected section. Because it doesn't have the obvious "learnable" content of Maths, it tends to get the least practice at home. It's worth exactly as much as the others.

Two things to check before test day

First, confirm the current-cycle format on the official placement test page. The figures above match the 2026-entry practice papers and the published test-day timetable, and the Department hasn't announced any change to the Reading format, but they set the test, not us. Second, make sure your child has seen the matching questions at least a few times before they meet them for real. It's the cheapest few marks on the paper.

If you'd like a feel for the comprehension half, PrepKit has a free five-minute sample quiz for the selective test. For the bigger picture of all four sections, see our guide to the selective test format, and for the section most families under-prepare for the other way, how to help with the writing test.