This study examines text comprehension as related to the identification of the discourse topic in both high and low socioeconomic status (SES) high-school students in Israël. High SES subjects perform good on coherent texts, when the discourse-topic is placed in the beginning. Low SES subjects perform more poorly on coherent, but better on incoherent texts. Group differences in the benefit from discourse-topic mention relate to SES rather than to academic ability and analogy interferes with understanding when there is no discourse-topic mention in the beginning of the text.