Reading Comprehension: Structure, Support, and Stems
What this domain tests
Reading Comprehension is 50 items in 60 minutes across three passages, typically one natural science, one social science, and one humanities text of roughly 1,200–1,500 words each. Questions test main idea, explicitly stated detail, inference, tone and attitude, vocabulary in context, the author's logic, and application of the passage's argument to a new case.
How to work a passage
- Read once for structure, not for memorization. Label each paragraph's job in the margin: claim, evidence, counterargument, concession, conclusion.
- Detail questions are lookup tasks: the answer is a paraphrase in the passage, so return to the line instead of trusting memory.
- Inference questions need textual support, not real-world truth. If you cannot point to a sentence, the choice is wrong.
- Tone questions turn on adjectives and adverbs. A phrase like "critics have long assumed" signals the author is about to disagree.
- Vocabulary questions ask for meaning in context; predict a substitute before reading the options.
- EXCEPT and NOT questions: three choices are supported and one is not. Verify each against the text instead of hunting for the odd one out.
Worked example
The passage states: "Critics predicted the policy would suppress hiring; employment data from the following two years, however, showed no measurable decline."
Question: The author most likely believes the critics' prediction was…
The "however" sets the author against the critics, and the evidence given is "no measurable decline" - the predicted effect simply did not appear. The correct answer is that the prediction was not borne out by subsequent data. A tempting wrong choice is that the policy increased hiring, but the passage reports no decline, not a rise; that claim is stronger than the text supports.
Traps that cost marks
- Picking a statement that is true in the world but absent from the passage.
- Confusing a view the author reports with the view the author holds.
- Overlooking one negation in the stem.
- Choosing answers with always, never, or only when the passage says often.
- Inferring causation from a correlation the passage merely describes.
- Answering from memory instead of returning to the cited lines.