True / False / Not Given: two statements, one wrong rule
A General Training candidate is working on a Section 3 passage about a town's shared-bicycle scheme. The relevant text reads:
"The scheme was launched in 2019 with funding from the regional health authority. The council states that its principal purpose was to improve residents' fitness rather than to reduce traffic, and that congestion was already falling before the bikes appeared. Of the 1,200 annual members, most use a bike to travel to work. Day passes are popular with visitors and account for 40 per cent of all hires. Some traders complained in the first year that docking stations took parking spaces, and the council has since relocated two of them."
Two statements are set:
(a) Local employers supported the launch of the scheme. (b) The scheme was introduced mainly to cut traffic congestion.
The candidate answers (a) FALSE and (b) NOT GIVEN. His reasoning, written in the margin: "(a) is false because the passage never mentions employers; (b) is not given because the passage doesn't say traffic was the main aim, it only says congestion was falling."
1. Diagnose the candidate's answer to statement (a). What is the correct answer, and where exactly did his reasoning break down?
Read the worked answer
His answer to (a) is inverted. The correct answer is NOT GIVEN.
His rule appears to be: "if the passage does not mention the subject, the statement must be false." That is the single most common misreading of this question type. FALSE requires the passage to contradict the statement - you must be able to point at a sentence and say "the text says the opposite of this". Here there is no such sentence. The passage names the health authority (funder) and the council (operator), plus "some traders" who complained. Employers are simply absent.
Absence produces NOT GIVEN, not FALSE, because the writer has not committed to anything on the subject. A statement can only be false if the text asserts its negation.
A working test the candidate can apply under time pressure: "Can I underline the sentence that proves this statement wrong?" If he cannot put a finger on one specific line, the answer is NOT GIVEN. He cannot underline anything for (a), so NOT GIVEN follows immediately - in about five seconds, which is also a timing win.
2. Now diagnose (b). The candidate says the passage "doesn't say traffic was the main aim". Is that reading of the text defensible?
Read the worked answer
No - and this is a reading error rather than a rule error. The correct answer is FALSE.
The passage does not merely omit the traffic aim; it explicitly replaces it: "its principal purpose was to improve residents' fitness rather than to reduce traffic". That construction is a direct denial of the statement's claim about the main aim. The contrast word "rather than" is doing the work, and it is exactly the kind of signal a candidate must slow down for.
The second half of the sentence - congestion was already falling before the bikes appeared - reinforces the point. If the problem was already improving independently, the scheme's stated purpose cannot have been to solve it.
So the two answers are the mirror image of what the candidate produced: (a) is silent → NOT GIVEN; (b) is contradicted → FALSE. Notice that in both cases the length of the passage is irrelevant. He had enough information for both statements in one sentence each.
3. The candidate concludes that he should "read more slowly". Is speed his problem? Give him a decision procedure that would have produced both answers correctly.
Read the worked answer
Speed is not the problem - the passage is short and he located the right sentences. His problem is that he applies one rule inconsistently: he treats silence as falsity in (a) and as silence in (b), when the text actually contradicts him in (b). Reading more slowly would have made him more confidently wrong.
The procedure to drill instead, in this order:
- Underline the key content words in the statement before looking at the passage: (a) local employers / supported / launch; (b) introduced mainly / cut / traffic congestion.
- Locate the matching part of the text using those words, or a paraphrase of them ("principal purpose" ↔ "introduced mainly").
- Ask one question only: does the text say the same thing, the opposite thing, or nothing at all? Same → TRUE. Opposite → FALSE. Nothing, and no sentence you can point to → NOT GIVEN.
- Never use outside knowledge. Whether employers in real towns usually back bike schemes is irrelevant and is a classic trap in General Training.
Applied mechanically, this gives (a) NOT GIVEN and (b) FALSE in under a minute.