What is the main idea of the passage?

Memory is rebuilt each time, so later information can change what a person remembers. (The passage replaces the recording idea with rebuilding and shows a later question changing the memory.)

A week later, what were the people who heard the word smashed more likely to report?

Broken glass that the film did not contain. (The second paragraph states this directly, and notes that the film contained no broken glass.)

Why does the passage say a confident witness and an accurate witness are not the same?

Because a memory can absorb later details while still feeling completely real. (The witnesses are described as honest; their memory changed without any loss of confidence.)

In this passage, leading questions are questions that:

push the answer toward a particular version of events (The example shows a word inside the question shaping the answer, which is what makes such a question leading.)

Memory Is Rebuilt: Level 3 Reading Comprehension Questions

People often describe memory as a recording. You press play, and the past returns exactly as it was. Laboratory work suggests something less comfortable. Memory is not replayed; it is rebuilt, and the room you rebuild it in leaves fingerprints on the result.

In a classic design, participants watch a film of a traffic accident and then answer questions about it. The wording of the question changes the answer. Asked how fast the cars were going when they smashed into each other, people give higher speeds than those asked when the cars hit each other. A week later, the smashed group is also more likely to report broken glass, in a film that contained none.

Nothing about this makes the witnesses dishonest. They are not inventing a story to please anyone; they are recalling a memory that has quietly absorbed the later question. This is why careful investigators avoid leading questions, and why a confident witness and an accurate witness are not the same thing.

Comprehension questions