Two Headings That Both Fit: Concession Versus Main Claim
Timur is on the second reading passage, a 680-word article about urban beekeeping. He has 20 minutes for the passage and 13 questions. Six paragraphs must be matched to headings chosen from a list of nine, six of which will be used. Paragraph 4 opens: "Yet the honeybee is not the city's only pollinator." Paragraph 5 opens: "None of this is to say that rooftop hives are harmless." Two headings in the list are "Urban hives: a fashion with unintended consequences" and "Growing doubts about the benefits of city bees". Timur has already assigned the second of these to paragraph 4, because paragraph 4 mentions a decline in wild bee species. He is also stuck on a True/False/Not Given item: "Urban hives produce more honey per colony than rural hives do." The passage says hobbyists "report yields of up to 40 kg per hive, roughly double the national average - figures that no one has yet verified". He has 11 minutes left and has not started the final passage.
1. Which heading belongs to paragraph 4 and which to paragraph 5? Justify the choice using the paragraph openers and the function of each paragraph.
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Paragraph 4: "Growing doubts about the benefits of city bees." Paragraph 5: "Urban hives: a fashion with unintended consequences."
Reasoning:
- Read the discourse marker first. "Yet" signals a turn against what came before: the passage has been describing benefits, and paragraph 4 pushes back. That is the doubts heading. Timur's assignment of that heading to paragraph 4 is correct; his reason for it (the mention of wild-species decline) happens to be right, but the marker is the reliable evidence.
- "None of this is to say that..." introduces a new, stronger move: it concedes that the previous points stand, then raises harm. "Unintended consequences" captures harm following from something well-intentioned - which is what paragraph 5 develops (hive density, competition, disease transfer).
- Watch the trap. A heading containing a striking noun from the paragraph ("decline", "species") is not automatically correct; headings summarise the paragraph's job, not its vocabulary. Timur's error risk is the reverse of what he did: he might now over-correct and move the doubts heading to paragraph 5, where it fits less well because paragraph 5 has moved past doubt to consequence.
2. Resolve the True/False/Not Given item and explain where the evidence for your judgement actually lies.
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Answer: Not Given.
The statement is Urban hives produce more honey per colony than rural hives do. Three checks:
- Is there a comparison? Yes - the passage does compare: 40 kg per hive against "roughly double the national average". So this is not a simple absence-of-information case, which is where most candidates go wrong in the other direction.
- Whose claim is it? It is attributed to hobbyists ("report") and explicitly flagged as unverified ("figures that no one has yet verified"). The passage reports a claim about production, not production.
- Does the statement match the claim's force? The statement asserts a fact about yields; the passage asserts that people say so. A verified fact and an unverified report are not the same proposition, so the text neither confirms nor contradicts it as stated.
Rule to carry forward: when a figure in the passage carries an attribution verb (report, claim, estimate, according to) or a hedge, an item that restates the figure as plain fact is usually Not Given, not True. If the item had read "Hobbyists report yields roughly double the national average", the answer would be True.
3. With 11 minutes left and passage 3 untouched, what should Timur do? Give a concrete plan with minutes attached.
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A defensible plan, given 13 questions in passage 3 and 11 minutes:
- 0–2 min: skim for structure, not content. Read the first sentence of each paragraph and the questions, and note which question types are present. Do not read the passage in full.
- 2–8 min: answer the highest-yield items first. Detail and short-answer items are located by scanning keywords, which is faster than the inference items that swallow time. Matching-headings, if present, goes last, because it requires whole-paragraph reading.
- 8–10 min: fill every remaining blank by elimination. No negative marking means a blank is a guaranteed loss.
- 10–11 min: check that answers are on the answer sheet in the right order - the commonest last-minute disaster is a one-off shift in numbering.
What he must not do is try to "do passage 3 properly". Completeness on an unfinished passage is worth more than perfection on two items, and the reading paper rewards item-level triage exactly as the listening paper does.