This study aims at understanding how the use of different reading activities affects readers' comprehension of short stories. Forty-seven students with an advanced level of English proficiency participated in the study where a quasi-experimental research design was pursued. The experimental and control groups of students completed different sets of activities on the same short story. The experimental group was given a set of activities comprising previewing, predicting, keywords, scanning, skimming, clarifying, summarising, question and answer, and drawing conclusions; while the control group did activities including brainstorming, predicting, surveying, reciprocal teaching, evaluating, inferring, rereading, thinking aloud, discussion, and summarising activities. A pos-test measured both literal comprehension and evaluation of the textual information. Statistical analysis revealed that the experimental group outperformed the control group on literal comprehension while the control group did better on evaluation questions, implying a differential influence of the activities on different types of comprehension. The study suggests that reading teachers need to be sensitive to the requirements of comprehension tasks in their selection of reading activities.