Which statement best states the main idea?

A royal survey made the country visible to the state, which is why it mattered (The last paragraph names the deep result: the survey made land, labour and livestock legible, and therefore taxable.)

According to the passage, where did the officials get their answers?

from juries of local men, checked against other juries (The first paragraph says answers came from local juries and were cross-checked against other juries.)

Why does the writer call the name 'Domesday' useful evidence?

It shows how the people being counted experienced the survey (The clerks called it a description; the people called it judgement day. The popular name records their feeling, since there was no appeal.)

In the final paragraph, 'legible' means

able to be seen and understood clearly (The sentence continues 'what a state can see it can assess', so legible here means visible and understandable to the government.)

The Book Of Judgement: Level 5 Reading Comprehension Questions

Twenty years after taking England by force, William the Conqueror sent officials into almost every shire with the same list of questions. Who held this land before the conquest, who holds it now, how many ploughs, how many mills, how many people, and what is the whole worth? Answers were given by juries of local men, checked against the answers of other juries, and written down in compressed Latin. The survey began in 1085 and the main volume was finished with unusual speed.

The king's clerks called it a description. The English called it Domesday, the day of judgement, because there was no appeal against what it recorded. That name is the clearest surviving evidence of how the survey felt to the people it counted.

Its purpose is still argued. Some historians read a tax register; others read a legal record fixing who owned what after two decades of confiscation, which was convenient for a ruling class that had arrived recently and by violence. The two readings are not exclusive.

Either way the book did something quietly radical. It made land, labour and livestock legible to a central government, and what a state can see it can assess, and what it can assess it can tax.

Comprehension questions