Explicit Detail and Factual Information
What this domain tests
Explicit Detail and Factual Information asks you to locate and restate facts stated directly in the passage: names, numbers, dates, causes, sequences, and definitions. No interpretation is required, but precision is. The passage always contains the answer; your job is to find it and match it exactly.
Core rules
- Answer from the text, not from memory. Even if you know the subject, the question asks what this passage says. Outside knowledge can make a wrong option feel right.
- Use the question's keywords as a locator. Names, capitalised terms, and numerals are easy to scan for. Once located, read the whole sentence plus the sentence before and after.
- Watch quantifiers and qualifiers. All, most, some, only, never, primarily change meaning. An option that swaps some for all is false even if the topic matches.
- Respect sequence and causation. If the passage says X happened before Y, an option saying Y caused X is wrong.
- Paraphrase is normal. Correct options rarely repeat the passage word for word; they restate it in different words.
Worked example
Passage sentence: "The survey, conducted over eighteen months, found that only a third of participants had read the instructions before assembling the shelving."
Question: According to the passage, how long did the survey last?
- (A) Three months
- (B) Eighteen months
- (C) One year
- (D) It is not stated.
(B) is correct: the duration is stated directly. Note how the distractors borrow numbers from elsewhere in the sentence - "a third" becomes three months, and eighteen months is halved to a year. The reasoning is simple location plus resistance to nearby number contamination.
Traps that cost marks
- Selecting an option that is true in general but not stated in the passage.
- Missing a negation ("did not", "rarely") and choosing the opposite.
- Confusing two similar entities in the passage (two researchers, two cities, two dates).
- Answering from the first sentence that mentions the keyword when a later sentence gives the specific fact requested.
- Ignoring a scope word such as only or primarily that makes an otherwise plausible option false.
Slow down on numerals and negatives; they are where detail questions are usually lost.