The revised edition of National English Curriculum Standard for Senior High School attaches great importance to the development of students’ key competences. As one of the key assessment tools for students’ scholastic achievement in high school, the National Matriculation Test, or the Chinese Gaokao, should also focus on the examination of students’ key competences in different subjects. A 40-year diachronic research of the development of the Reading Comprehension questions in National Matriculation English Test (NMET) papers finds that more efforts are needed to achieve this objective. Based on a study of the assessment frameworks and practices of the well-established projects in assessing reading literacy, which include PISA, PIRLS and NAEP, this paper proposes that more emphasis should be put on the content reform of NMET papers and that the following four aspects should be the foci: to validly define the testing construct of reading literacy, to diversify text genres, to enrich text formats and to scientifically design task format. Only in this way can the curriculum reform go deeper and come to fruition.