Nineteen minutes, seventeen questions: triage in the Reading component
Daniel is 16 minutes into a 35-minute Reading component. He has answered 8 of 25 questions, all from the first text, and has already re-checked three of them twice. He now has 19 minutes for Text 2 (7 questions) and Text 3 (10 questions). Text 3 is the longest and contains a matching-headings task he finds hardest. On his current question - a heading for a paragraph about urban tree-planting budgets - he has narrowed the choice to two headings and has already spent three minutes. He is reluctant to move on because he wants to finish Text 2 'properly' first. He knows the platform does not penalise wrong answers and there is no negative marking. He also suspects that one statement in Text 3 may be either False or Not Given, and wants to know how to decide when he gets there.
1. Build a defensible time plan for the remaining 19 minutes and justify the ordering.
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Budget by marks, not by comfort. Nineteen minutes for seventeen questions is roughly a minute per question plus slack: about seven minutes on Text 2, nine on Text 3, three for a final sweep. Every question carries equal weight, so text order is irrelevant - what matters is marks per minute.
His instinct to 'finish Text 2 properly' is the actual risk, not the clock. He has already spent time re-checking eight answers he cannot improve, which is a comfort behaviour rather than a scoring strategy. Double-checking earns nothing unless there is a specific doubt to resolve.
A defensible alternative is Text 3 first. A hard matching-headings set rewards fresher attention, and its ten questions are worth more than Text 2's seven. Either order works if he sets a hard exit time per text - say, leave Text 2 at the eight-minute mark whatever state it is in. What fails is drifting into Text 2 with no clock and meeting Text 3 with four minutes left.
2. How should he resolve the stuck heading, and what rule should replace his intuition?
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Two things are wrong: the time already spent, and the decision rule being used. Three minutes on one mark is a loss whatever he eventually answers.
The rule: a heading must cover the paragraph's main idea, not one vivid detail. He should re-read the first and last sentences, ask what the whole paragraph is doing - describing a problem, proposing a solution, reporting disagreement, tracing a change over time - and pick the heading that still fits if he deletes any single supporting sentence.
Between the two remaining candidates, the loser is usually the one that echoes a repeated keyword. Repetition is exactly what makes a distractor attractive: test writers lift a phrase from the paragraph into the wrong heading. If both still fit, take the more general one, record it, flag it, and move on. A flagged answer can be revisited during the sweep; an unvisited question cannot be answered at all.
3. He reaches a statement: 'Tree-planting schemes reduce summer temperatures in every district where they are introduced.' How should he decide between False and Not Given?
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The passage reports that the cooling effect 'varied widely and was negligible in two of the eleven districts'. That contradicts 'every district', so the answer is False, not Not Given.
The test to apply: Not Given means the passage is silent on the point, or mentions the topic without committing to it. False means the passage commits to something incompatible with the statement. The two are not a scale of confidence - they are different relationships between text and claim.
The tell here is the absolute quantifier. Words like every, all, only, never and first are the easiest things for a passage to contradict, which is why items are usually built on them. So the procedure is: locate the sentence about the effect, check whether it quantifies anything, then compare like with like. He should not judge from the passage's general optimism about tree-planting, which is a background tone rather than a factual commitment.