Applying Information to a New Context
What you must be able to do
Take a rule, pattern, or causal claim from the passage and see whether it holds in a situation the passage never mentions. The subject matter of the new case is usually different; the underlying relationship must be identical.
Concepts to master
- Extract the abstract relation. Strip the content: "a method that measures only X is used to draw conclusions about Y, so the conclusions overreach." Then test each option against that sentence.
- Preserve the direction of the relation. If the passage says A limits B, an answer in which B limits A is wrong however similar the vocabulary.
- Respect stated conditions. If the passage's claim holds "only when the sample is large," an application that drops the condition fails.
- Principle-based application. When the passage states or implies a rule, the answer is the case the rule covers - not the case that merely resembles it.
Traps
Surface similarity (same topic, wrong relation), reversed relations, mappings that quietly add a moral or evaluative judgment the passage never made, and cases that are too extreme for the original rule to reach.
Rule of thumb and worked example
Write the relation in one sentence with placeholders before looking at the options. Then check each option against the placeholders.
Example: the passage argues that a measurement tool's precision is irrelevant if the underlying category is vaguely defined, so refinements in precision do not improve the conclusions. An analogous case: a survey uses a finer rating scale for "community satisfaction" even though no one has specified what counts as the community. Same relation - precision without definition. A wrong answer would be a case about a well-defined category measured imprecisely; it sounds similar but inverts the point.