What is the passage mainly about?

A map claims permanence, so Aurel dates his to keep it honest (The whole passage builds the tension between a map's claim to permanence and a shrinking village, and it resolves with the date.)

Why was the bridge never replaced?

The people who needed it had already left (The first paragraph gives the reason directly: the people who needed it had already left.)

Why is the small date called the most honest mark on the sheet?

It admits the map is only true for one moment (Because Valea keeps shrinking, everything else on the map may already be false. Only the date makes no promise about the future.)

In this passage, subtraction describes a place that is

steadily losing people and buildings (It sits beside closing shutters, a lost bridge, and departed residents, so it means continuous loss.)

The Mapmaker Of Valea: Level 4 Reading Comprehension Questions

The ministry sent Aurel to redraw the map of Valea because the old one had become a polite fiction. Roads on paper ended in open fields. A bridge marked in confident black had gone into the river during a flood eight years earlier, and the village had never replaced it, because the people who needed it had already left.

Aurel worked slowly, and the slowness bothered him. A map is a claim about permanence, he thought, and Valea was a place in the middle of subtraction. Each week another shutter closed for good. If he drew the school, would the school still be there when the ink dried in an office two hundred kilometers away?

In the end he drew everything that stood, and then he added a small date in the corner, smaller than the scale and smaller than his own name. It was the most honest mark on the sheet. It told the reader that the map was not a description of Valea, but a description of one particular Tuesday.

Comprehension questions