After five hours on the case, Sherlock Holmes had reached the following conclusions about the mysterious scroll: it was written in an ideographic language using a fountain pen containing ink imported from India. The writer was left-handed and in his late 40s. And the message? Almost certainly a clue about the series of gruesome murders that had shocked the Chinese quarter the previous summer. "But as for what it actually says," he concluded with a sigh, "I'll be damned if it isn't Chinese to me too."

Our HSK test for today is an intermediate-level reading exam. In each of these questions you are given a short passage, and then asked a brief question to gauge your understanding. At the intermediate level the correct answer is often implied rather than stated directly. If you consider your Chinese up to snuff, see if you can one-up Sherlock Holmes and decipher the mystery of this HSK test.