In order to decode a paragraph they had to use their prior knowledge of vocabulary words. Secondly, they were given a sample passage with nonsense words and were expected to use their reading comprehension abilities to answer the questions given by the teacher. One example shown is the teacher reading the nonsense passage and asking the students “when did the story take place?” the student responded “last serny” without any idea what the story was about. This showed that students did not need to understand the story to answer the questions; the only prerequisite was background knowledge