11 Plus Tips: how to succeed in comprehension

Cause and Effect in Comprehension

This may seem obvious, but sometimes it helps to offer certitude to the things we think we know – or, rather, the things we hope our children know.

One such thing is cause and effect in comprehension questions. What do I mean by cause and effect in comprehension questions? Take the following question:

Q. How does Sissy Jupe react to being called out by Mr. Gradgrind?

A. With retaliation

B. With humiliation

C. With coolness

D. With humour

E. With pride

What the question is doing is giving us the cause (Mr. Gradgrind’s calling out Sissy Jupe) and asking us to find the effect.

Conversely, the question

may be written:

Q. Why is Sissy Jupe unsettled?

A. Because she doesn’t know that “twenty” is the answer to the maths problem

B. Because Mr. Gradgrind is brandishing weapons

C. Because she has forgotten her own name

D. Because Mr. Gradgrind is depersonalising her

E. Because her school uniform fits her poorly

Now the question is giving us the effect (Sissy Jupe is unsettled) and asking us to identify the cause.

How does knowing this help us? Often – though not always – in the real world, we know that something causes an effect because the cause and the effect happen closely together in space and time. If you blow into a balloon and the balloon grows bigger, you can be pretty sure that your act of blowing i

nto the balloon is the cause of the balloon’s growth.

The same is true of cause and effect in fiction: they usually happen closely together within the text.

Therefore, when the question is asking for the cause of an effect, if we can find the effect in the text, we shall find the cause very close by. Conversely, when the question is asking for the effect of a cause, if we find the cause in the text, we shall find the effect very close by.

This can be useful to know when confronted with a one-and-a-half-page comprehension paper. (After all, where within this jungle of text should we be looking for the answer?) Knowing that causes and effects

are close together can help a child be confident when locating information in a longer text.

Mr. Gradgrind and Sissy Jupe are, of course, characters from Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. I won’t reproduce one-and-a-half pages of text here, but if we consider the following short extract it should suffice:

Indeed, as he eagerly sparkled at them from the cellarage before mentioned, he seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge. He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed away.

In the text above, I have highlighted the cause in red and the effect in blue. It should be apparent that cause and effect are close together in the text, and by identifying the cause we should be able to quickly find – and know – the effect. And in the reverse, by identifying the effect we should be able to quickly find – and know – the cause.