Reading Comprehension (Part B): Reading for Evidence, Not Opinion
What the multiple-choice section rewards
Part B is an evidence test. Every correct answer can be traced to a specific sentence, image, or structural move in the passage. Prior knowledge, personal taste, and outside facts earn nothing.
Concepts you must control
- Stated vs. implied meaning, and the difference between a main idea, a thesis, and a supporting detail.
- Function questions: why a paragraph, sentence, or example is there - to illustrate, qualify, concede, contrast, or shift the argument.
- Tone vs. mood: tone is the writer's attitude (wry, elegiac, indignant); mood is the feeling created in the reader.
- Figurative language and irony - verbal, situational, dramatic - and how understatement or hyperbole shapes meaning.
- Point of view and reliability: a narrator's claims are not automatically the author's.
- Structure and shift: where the passage turns, and what the ending revises.
- Synthesis: how one text responds to, complicates, or contradicts another.
Traps that cost marks
- True but irrelevant - an option quoting the passage accurately but not answering the stem.
- Absolute language - always, never, proves, everyone - almost always wrong in inference items.
- Tone/mood swaps and near-synonyms (critical vs. sarcastic vs. detached).
- Over-reading - an inference must be supported by more than one loaded word.
- Half-read stems - watch for EXCEPT, best, most directly, primarily.
Worked example
Line: "The garden was immaculate, though no one had planted it in years." An option saying "the narrator admires gardening" is loosely true but misses the line's ironic function - order preserved without care. Read one sentence before and after, paraphrase the option, then eliminate anything true-but-off-task.