AbilityBenchText difficulty
Reading level test that climbs until you stop clearing it
Six passages, each harder than the last, with three questions on each. Answer two of three and the ladder goes up; answer one and it stops. The result is the measured readability of the hardest passage you handled and of the one that stopped you — a band, computed from the passage text on this page with both formulas cited.
Six passages, each harder than the one before, three questions on each. Two right and the ladder goes up; one right and it stops there. The result is the readability of the hardest passage you handled — a measurement of text you got through, reported in the units the formulas actually produce.
The ladder, before you climb it
The six run from 56 words about a dog waiting at a gate to 124 words about how a court reads a statute. The grades are not shown until the end, because knowing that the next passage is rated for a graduate reader changes how you approach it. What is worth knowing beforehand is the rule: three questions, two to pass, no going back, and the climb stops the first time a passage is not cleared.
Every question is answerable from the passage in front of you. None of them assumes you know anything about bread, insurance, monetary policy or law — where a passage uses a term, the passage defines it or the sentence carries it.
A full climb is eighteen questions and takes about six minutes. Most runs are shorter, because most runs stop.
The six rungs
| Passage | Words | Flesch-Kincaid grade | Reading Ease |
|---|---|---|---|
| A dog waiting at a gate | 56 | 0.0 | 108 |
| Why a kite flies | 82 | 4.9 | 89 |
| Why bread rises | 92 | 8.1 | 70 |
| How insurance pools risk | 133 | 10.7 | 52 |
| How a policy rate reaches a mortgage | 121 | 13.8 | 32 |
| How a court reads a statute | 124 | 19.3 | 1 |
Grades are Kincaid, Fishburne, Rogers & Chissom (1975), Derivation of new readability formulas for Navy enlisted personnel, Research Branch Report 8-75, Naval Air Station Memphis; Reading Ease is Flesch (1948), A new readability yardstick, Journal of Applied Psychology. Both take the same two inputs — average words per sentence and average syllables per word — and both are computed in your browser from the passage text rather than stored. Syllables are counted with the vowel-group rule every browser readability tool falls back on without a pronunciation dictionary, so another tool may land a few tenths of a grade away on the same text; that is the counter, not the writing.
The rungs sit 2.6 to 5.5 grades apart, which is the finest distinction the ladder can draw. Everybody starts at the bottom, because a two-of-three rule only means something if the first rung is one nobody misses. An item interrupted by switching tabs is asked again within the same rung rather than at the end, since on a ladder the next question depends on the last answer.
What a readability grade can and cannot see
A grade is a property of a text, not of a reader. The Kincaid refit was made so training manuals could be checked against the reading of the people who had to use them — a question about documents in bulk, which two counts answer reasonably well. Neither count can see whether the words are familiar or whether you have met the subject before. A paragraph of short sentences built from short technical words scores as easy prose and is impenetrable outside its field, and a long, well-built sentence about something you know reads more easily than the formula predicts.
That is why each rung changes subject as well as sentence length — from a kite to bread to insurance to monetary policy to a statute — so what a passage assumes you know climbs with the arithmetic. If the difficulty you keep hitting is vocabulary and grammar rather than long sentences, the English level test and the sentence completion test go at those directly.
This is a measurement exercise, not a clinical assessment. It reports what you did on this page against a stated reference and nothing more — it cannot establish a reading difficulty, a language delay or a comprehension disorder. Only a qualified professional, working with more than a browser, can make that judgment.
Reading the band you landed in
Does grade 10.7 mean I read at a tenth-grade level?
No. It means the passage that stopped being easy for you computes to 10.7 on a formula that measures sentences and syllables in text. A readability grade was designed to say who a document suits — a publisher's or a teacher's question — and has no way to describe a person. The true statement this page can make is narrower: text of about that difficulty is text you answered questions about correctly, and the next rung up was not.
Why does the climb stop as soon as I miss a rung?
Because the ladder is looking for a boundary, and once a rung is not cleared the harder ones say how far past the boundary you are rather than where it is. The cost of the rule is that one careless answer can end a run early — which is why the result prints both ends of the band, and why a second climb is often the one worth keeping.
Schools quote a number from a commercial reading framework. Is that what this is?
No, and no public tool can produce those numbers. The frameworks used to match a book to a reader are proprietary: their formulas are licensed rather than published and calibrated on the publisher's own corpus. What is public is the Flesch family, which is why this page uses it and shows the arithmetic. A grade from here and a number from a commercial framework do not convert into each other, and a site that offers to convert them is guessing.