Information Explicitly Stated
What you must be able to do
These questions ask what the passage says, not what it implies. The correct answer is always checkable by pointing to a specific sentence, and it is usually a paraphrase rather than a quotation.
Concepts to master
- Attribution. Know who said what. Passages routinely present a critic's or researcher's claim that the author then disputes; an answer attributing the critic's view to the author is wrong.
- Quantifiers and degree. Track all, most, many, some, few, none, and hedges like tends to, may, in some cases. Most rephrasing traps involve a silent quantifier shift.
- Time and condition. Watch tense and conditional framing: at first, by the 1980s, if X then Y. An answer that turns a conditional into a flat assertion distorts the text.
- Scope of the claim. A statement about one species, one city, or one experiment cannot be generalized in the answer choice.
Traps
Outside knowledge (a choice that is true in the world but absent from the passage), entity confusion (swapping the two sides of a comparison), and the near-miss paraphrase that changes one word.
Rule of thumb and worked example
Before evaluating choices, locate the relevant sentence and mark it. If you cannot point to it, the choice is wrong no matter how sensible it sounds.
Example: the passage says "most critics at the time ignored the novel." A choice reading "the novel was ignored by critics" fails on two counts - it drops most and it drops at the time. A choice reading "contemporary reviewers largely disregarded the novel" passes both tests.