Reading Comprehension
What Section I, Part A tests
The reading part gives you authentic print - infographics, advertisements, news reports, opinion columns, letters, instructions, literary fragments - and asks about main idea, detail, inference, author's purpose, tone, intended audience, organization, and vocabulary in context. You have roughly 40 minutes for about 30 questions, so pace matters: a little over a minute per item, including reading.
Rules that produce right answers
- Identify the genre from the header and layout. An advertisement, a letter to the editor, and a scientific note use different registers and have different purposes; the purpose question is often answerable before you read a single line.
- Read for gist first, then attack the questions. Most stems point to a specific part of the text, so return to that sentence and read the lines around it.
- Respect scope. If the stem says principalmente or la idea central, a true but narrow detail is wrong; if it cites a line, a global summary is wrong.
- Vocabulary in context: plug each option into the sentence and check grammar and logic, not just the dictionary meaning.
- Inference answers need evidence you can point to, not what you happen to know about the topic.
Worked example
Text: «Aunque el trueque ha desaparecido de las grandes ciudades, en muchas comunidades andinas sigue siendo la base del intercambio diario.» Question: ¿Cuál es el propósito principal del autor? A) Describir el origen histórico del trueque. B) Señalar que una práctica tradicional sigue vigente. C) Criticar la economía de las ciudades. D) Explicar cómo funciona el comercio informal.
Answer: B. The concessive «aunque» sets up a contrast with an expectation - you would assume the practice is gone - and «sigue siendo» delivers the correction. A is a plausible topic that is never developed; C and D are not stated. Choosing A is the classic scope error.
Traps that cost marks
- Options that are true in the real world but absent from the text.
- Absolute words in options: siempre, nunca, todos, únicamente.
- Confusing the author's view with a view the author quotes in order to refute.
- Overlooking NO / EXCEPTO questions.
- Rereading the whole passage for every item instead of targeted rereading.