Which comprehension type involves understanding meaning by integrating prior knowledge with the text?

• A. Critical Comprehension
• B. Literal Comprehension
• C. Context Clues
• D. Improving Comprehension

Answer: (A)

Integrating what you already know with what the text says to understand meaning means moving beyond the words on the page and forming interpretation by combining evidence from the text with your own knowledge and experience. This kind of thinking is central to critical comprehension, where you analyze ideas, consider motives, and draw conclusions that aren’t stated outright. For example, if a story describes a character making a difficult choice and you use your own sense of ethics and past experiences to weigh that choice, you’re using prior knowledge to interpret the text’s meaning. Literal comprehension would just ask you to restate explicit facts from the passage, context clues would focus on figuring out an unfamiliar word from surrounding words, and improving comprehension refers to strategies for understanding in general rather than the specific act of integrating knowledge with text to derive meaning.