What is the central point of the passage?

Because Ilse can never ask her future buyers what they want, she must hold to one unbending standard of her own. (The middle paragraph gives exactly this chain: the buyer is unknown and unreachable, so her own standard is the only one available, and it cannot be bent.)

About how many of her bowls does Ilse break?

About one in three. (The first sentence says she breaks about a third of them herself.)

Why does Ilse keep the crooked bowl instead of breaking it?

Its value to her is personal, not a matter of craft quality. (She calls it the worst thing she has made, yet keeps it because it was made the week her father died. Its meaning comes from memory, not from quality.)

In "There is one exception," the word exception means:

a case that does not follow the usual rule (Her rule is that flawed bowls get broken. This bowl is flawed and is not broken, so it is a case outside the rule.)

The Bowls She Breaks: Level 3 Reading Comprehension Questions

Ilse makes bowls for a living, and she breaks about a third of them herself. Customers find this strange. The bowls she destroys look perfectly good to them: even in shape, smoothly glazed, strong enough to hold soup for a decade. She breaks them anyway, on the stone step behind the workshop, without ceremony.

Her reason is not perfectionism, though everyone assumes it is. A bowl leaves her hands and lasts fifty years. In that time it will be used by someone she will never meet, in a kitchen she cannot imagine. She cannot ask those people what they wanted. So the only standard available to her is her own, and she has learned that a standard she bends once stops working.

There is one exception, on a shelf above the kiln. It is a bowl with a crooked rim, made the week her father died. It is the worst thing she has produced since she was a student. She has been offered money for it twice, and both times she has said that it is not for sale.

Comprehension questions