Passages and questions
A reading passage and its questions are edited together on one screen. This is the most involved content type in the CMS, and the one with the most rules.
The passage
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Title | Shown in the passage list |
| Slug | Unique across all passages. It is the identity of the row — changing it on a live passage is effectively a new passage |
| Body | The passage text |
| Topic | For grouping |
| Format | Academic or General Training |
| Difficulty | Used to pick the easiest passage for the diagnostic |
| Headings | The shared list — see below |
Questions
Questions are edited inline beneath the passage, in order. Each one carries:
- Kind — one of the five types. See Question types.
- Prompt — the question itself.
- Options — for multiple choice only.
- Answer key — see below.
- Evidence — the sentence in the passage that makes the answer the answer.
- Explanation — why.
Evidence is not optional in practice
Evidence and explanation are what the candidate's review page is built from. A question marked right or wrong with nothing behind it teaches nobody anything — it just reports a result.
Answer keys
A key holds every accepted form of the answer, not just the best one. If both "cotton" and "raw cotton" would be accepted, both belong in the key.
Matching ignores capitalisation and surrounding whitespace, so you do not need to add case variants or worry about trailing spaces.
Answer keys are stored apart from the questions themselves, so a page that renders questions cannot accidentally serialise the answers into it.
The headings list
Matching-headings questions share one list per passage, not one per question.
Two rules make it behave like the real exam:
- More headings than paragraphs. The extra ones are distractors; without them the last question answers itself.
- Each heading is used at most once.
A passage with matching-headings questions and no headings list cannot be published — the completeness check catches it. See Draft and published.