Currently, learning English as a foreign language in Indonesia requires a compelled environment, such as a curriculum and textbooks. According to the English learning outcomes in the Merdeka Curriculum, students are supposed to have inference ability when understanding implicit information and have the skills to produce English texts with various and organized vocabulary. Then, to fulfill those skill requirements, learning activities are provided in the English textbook under Higher-Order Thinking Skills (HOTS). This study aims to ensure that the textbook properly develops students' ability to face in an English communication context. This study adopts Miles, Huberman, and Saldana's (2014) interactive model data analysis, which begins by pulling data from documents by identifying the textbook reading exercise and assigning a code to each item. Then, the researcher examines the data by determining, highlighting, and simplifying them before drawing and validating the final results. According to the findings of this study, the distribution of essay reading questions in the form of LOTS is higher than that of HOTS, where the LOTS is 87.4% and the HOTS is 12.6%. The essay reading questions in the textbook are also aligned with the HOTS criteria in the curriculum, which include questions in the categories of creative thinking and critical thinking.