In the context of the results of the international PISA and PIRLS surveys questions of reading skills, and above all reading with understanding, have been acquiring ever more significance. In our article we provide a qualitative analysis of data from a reading skills test put together from released exercises in the international PISA and PIRLS surveys. We obtained the data by means of the longitudinal CLoSE project involving the testing of 6211 pupils in 2012. We focused on perceptive skill in the understanding of the content of a polemic text among pupils in the 6th year of basic school and the first year of 8-year secondary grammar school. Our study was intended to identify the fields in which pupils were weak and to look for possible causes. One of the main findings was that the pupils had problems in distinguishing whether whether they had to find the answer to the question within the text or outside it, with reference to the chosen theoretical framework on the boundary of the textual base and the situational model of the text.