An important task for elementary school, and especially the social science subjects, is to enable young citizens to develop the advanced literacy crucial for participating in a modern society. This paper explores the literacy affordances in the Swedish national tests for geography and history. This is done through an analysis of the demands for reading, interpreting and responding to the tests. The results indicate surprisingly high demands for interpreting different types of multimodal represen- tations, while there are virtually no demands for reading and interpreting longer, coherent texts. The expectations for text production show a reverse pattern, with no demands for multimodal representations but extensive demands on writing advanced explanations and arguments. The implications of these literacy asymmetries are discussed critically, as the tests can be seen as a sanctioned model for subject-specific literacy.