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The ISEE Upper Level Reading section assesses your child’s abilities in the skills required for reading comprehension. It is an important test for those seeking to enter a private high school. They are tested on their ability to interpret linguistics, which are skills that should have developed throughout the lower and middle educational levels. The ISEE Upper Level Reading section uses passages drawn from sciences, humanities, essays, contemporary life, and other literature. With such a variety, your child will need to have the general skill for reading comprehension, rather than knowledge of the specific topic at hand. This allows this section of the test to truly assess their reading comprehension skills. With the increased difficulty in Upper Level Reading, it is important to devote some time to preparation ahead of the test by using Varsity Tutors’ Learning Tools like the Question of the Day.
The Learning Tools serve as viable study aids to help your child practice the concepts they have learned at school. Your child can use the variety of tools together or individually to create a study plan, and go from there. The Question of the Day is a valuable option that offers your child access to free daily test practice online. The Question of the Day is a timed question that is different each day, allowing you to determine how well your child understands the information that will be tested in the ISEE Upper Level Reading section.
With ISEE Upper Level Reading, your child will need to be able to focus on the key aspects of each passage. There are thematic elements, local organization, and other details that can make the difference in your child’s chosen answer. They will need to pay attention to each supporting idea, interaction between ideas, textual relationships, and other ideas that are less straightforward than in lower levels. You can help your child to prepare for these by encouraging them to study regularly and determinedly. Through ongoing practice, these skills can become second nature, readily accessed as they are needed. Your child can use the Learning Tools for precisely this level of practice.
The Learning Tools offer free ISEE Upper Level Reading section practice tests that your child can use to review information, practice concepts, and evaluate their preparation level. Through this, your child can further customize their study plan by addressing the areas that they need to work on most. In addition, they can use the flashcards to work on quick refresh, study in their free time, and identify any weak points. There are also full-length practice tests that are built to be similar to the real exam, and Learn by Concept, which offers a thorough review on each concept.
The Question of the Day uses passages pulled from contemporary life, history, science, and humanities essays. Your child may be asked to identify the supporting ideas, the main theme, the general idea behind the passage, any figurative language, infer the meanings behind conclusions, or draw a conclusion, as well as compare and contrast, make predictions, and discuss textual relationships. Further, they may need to compare the different themes for contradictions, or rewrite the summary in their own words. No matter what, your child can take their time, and answer the question when they are confident.
When it comes to studying for ISEE Upper Level Reading section, your child can use Varsity Tutors’ Learning Tools to strengthen their grasp on the concepts they will be tested on.
Question of the Day: ISEE Upper Level Reading
Adapted from "Exordium" by Edgar Allan Poe (1842)
In commencing, with the New Year, a New Volume, we shall be permitted to say a very few words by way of exordium to our usual chapter of Reviews, or, as we should prefer calling them, of Critical Notices. Yet we speak not for the sake of the exordium, but because we have really something to say, and know not when or where better to say it.
That the public attention, in America, has, of late days, been more than usually directed to the matter of literary criticism, is plainly apparent. Our periodicals are beginning to acknowledge the importance of the science (shall we so term it?) and to disdain the flippant opinion which so long has been made its substitute.
Time was when we imported our critical decisions from the mother country. For many years we enacted a perfect farce of subserviency to the dicta of Great Britain. At last a revulsion of feeling, with self-disgust, necessarily ensued. Urged by these, we plunged into the opposite extreme. In throwing totally off that “authority,” whose voice had so long been so sacred, we even surpassed, and by much, our original folly. But the watchword now was, “a national literature!”—as if any true literature could be “national”—as if the world at large were not the only proper stage for the literary histrio. We became, suddenly, the merest and maddest partizans in letters. Our papers spoke of “tariffs” and “protection.” Our Magazines had habitual passages about that “truly native novelist, Mr. Cooper,” or that “staunch American genius, Mr. Paulding.” Unmindful of the spirit of the axioms that “a prophet has no honor in his own land” and that “a hero is never a hero to his valet-de-chambre"—axioms founded in reason and in truth—our reviews urged the propriety—our booksellers the necessity, of strictly “American” themes. A foreign subject, at this epoch, was a weight more than enough to drag down into the very depths of critical damnation the finest writer owning nativity in the States; while, on the reverse, we found ourselves daily in the paradoxical dilemma of liking, or pretending to like, a stupid book the better because (sure enough) its stupidity was of our own growth, and discussed our own affairs.
It is, in fact, but very lately that this anomalous state of feeling has shown any signs of subsidence. Still it is subsiding. Our views of literature in general having expanded, we begin to demand the use–to inquire into the offices and provinces of criticism—to regard it more as an art based immoveably in nature, less as a mere system of fluctuating and conventional dogmas. And, with the prevalence of these ideas, has arrived a distaste even to the home-dictation of the bookseller-coteries. If our editors are not as yet all independent of the will of a publisher, a majority of them scruple, at least, to confess a subservience, and enter into no positive combinations against the minority who despise and discard it. And this is a very great improvement of exceedingly late date.
The word "histrio" as Poe uses it in the passage's third paragraph most likely means __________.
story
novel
critic
actor
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