Having read the story of the little girl, you feel moved by her suffering and…

Concept: In evaluating reading-comprehension-based writing tasks, question types are classified by the kind of thinking they demand of the reader relative to the source text. An expressive question asks the reader to voice personal feelings about the text in their own words. A long-answer question is a length/format category, not a cognitive one — it groups tasks by how much must be written, not by what kind of thinking is required. A discursive question calls for reasoned discussion or argument on a broader theme, usually without one fixed answer. An extrapolative question requires the reader to go beyond the text itself — projecting, applying, or extending the text's ideas to a new situation, action, or communicative purpose not literally given in the passage.

Application: The task asks the student to write a letter directly addressed to the little girl, appreciating her courage — a new communicative act that is not present in the source story at all. To do this, the student must infer the girl's suffering and courage from the text and then transfer that understanding into a fresh situation (a personal letter to her). This transfer of text-derived understanding into a new context is exactly what an extrapolative task requires.

Cross-check: Checking against the other categories confirms the fit: the task is not merely asking the student to state a reaction (ruling out a plain expressive reading); the roughly 120-word length is a format constraint that says nothing about the cognitive demand (ruling out length as the deciding factor); and the task is a targeted personal letter, not an open debate or argumentative essay on a theme (ruling out a discussion-based reading). Only the extrapolative category captures a task that carries understanding of the text into a new, text-external communicative situation.

Extrapolative question.