General Exam Technique and Core Reasoning Skills
What the General domain tests
The General domain covers no single school subject. Instead it tests the cross-cutting skills that every other section assumes: careful reading, logical reasoning, quantitative common sense, and the ability to eliminate weak options. Candidates must understand four ideas. First, question stems contain qualifiers such as most likely, except, best, and mainly; these words change the correct answer. Second, inference means drawing only conclusions the passage or data actually supports, not conclusions that are merely plausible. Third, proportional reasoning lets you compare quantities without exact arithmetic. Fourth, unit and scale awareness prevents answers that are numerically correct but physically absurd.
Traps that appear in questions
The most common trap is the true-but-irrelevant option: a statement that is factually correct yet does not answer the question asked. A second trap is absolute language (always, never, all, none); such options are rarely right unless the stem itself establishes certainty. A third is reversed causation - the option swaps cause and effect. A fourth is the distractor built from a detail in the passage, which tempts you to choose recognition over reasoning. Finally, watch for unit mismatches (minutes versus hours, metres versus centimetres) and for percentages of different bases.
Rule of thumb: the qualifier test
Before choosing, restate the stem in your own words and underline its qualifier.
Worked example: A train travels 120 km in 90 minutes. What is its average speed? Options: 60 km/h, 80 km/h, 90 km/h, 120 km/h. The trap is dividing 120 by 90, which gives 1.33 - meaningless because the units are mixed. Convert first: 90 minutes = 1.5 hours, so speed = 120 / 1.5 = 80 km/h. If no option matched, re-check the conversion before re-checking the arithmetic.
Building accuracy
Read the final sentence of the stem first to learn what is being asked, then read the passage. Answer in your own words before looking at the options, and cross out options you can disprove rather than hunting for the one you like.