Question 1 Skills: Explicit and Implicit Meanings | English Language for GCSE/IGCSE - Year 11 PDF Download

Introduction

Question 1: Comprehension in Paper 1 of your IGCSE evaluates your capacity to grasp both explicit and implicit meanings within a text. It also assesses your aptitude to extract and utilize information from the text for particular objectives.
The sections below will explain the difference between explicit and implicit meanings and how to recognize them: 

• Explicit versus implicit meanings
• Analysing explicit and implicit meanings

Explicit versus implicit meanings

Explicit information is evident and straightforwardly articulated. Implicit information, on the other hand, pertains to concepts that are inferred or understood without being explicitly described or stated. Implicit statements rely on implication, assumption, and inference to convey meaning.
For example:
Implicit information is deduced; this necessitates drawing logical conclusions based on the evidence presented. In the provided example, the perception that the corridor appears to be menacing is a logical deduction drawn from the observation that even the shadows "quake and shudder."

Analysing explicit and implicit meanings

Examining Explicit Information in Text:

Lyuba - The Baby Woolly Mammoth

• Lyuba is a one-month old baby mammoth who lived about 40,000 years ago.
• Scientists do not know how she died.
• She was discovered on a riverbank in Siberia.
• She is the most perfectly preserved woolly mammoth ever discovered.

Implications of the Discovery

• This is an amazing, unusual, and rare scientific discovery.
• Scientists around the world are astounded and excited by her discovery.
• Her discovery is big news, creating headlines across the globe.

What's most important is that you have evidence for all of your implied meanings (as in each of the examples above).

Critical Reading Tools

Critical reading can be compared to an autopsy, where you're tasked with dissecting a piece of text. To effectively analyze it, you must understand the available tools, how to utilize them, and when to employ the appropriate one. These reading tools aid in enhancing your examination of the given texts.
The four tools are:

• Question
• Clarify
• Evidence
• Infer