Reading Comprehension: What a Memo Actually Supports
A candidate is practising inference questions on the memo below. Her habit is to choose any option that echoes a number from the passage, and she has twice picked answers that go further than the text. Read the memo with that habit in mind.
'Two years ago the battalion replaced its paper dispatch log with tablets. The vendor promised a 30 percent cut in administrative time. Our own count shows each dispatch now takes 41 seconds longer to log, mainly because every entry needs three confirmation screens. Headquarters asks whether to keep the system. The answer depends on what is counted. The tablets have eliminated about 20 minutes a day of lost paperwork and roughly one misfiled dispatch a week, and each misfile used to cost a clerk an afternoon. Counting keystrokes alone makes the tablets look like a failure; counting the recovery work they prevent makes them look like a modest success.'
1. State the author's overall position and identify the single sentence that carries it.
Read the worked answer
Position: the tablets are a modest success, neither the 30 percent win the vendor promised nor the outright failure the logging time suggests. The verdict hinges on whether error-recovery time is included in the accounting.
Load-bearing sentence: 'The answer depends on what is counted.'
Everything before it sets up two conflicting measurements; everything after it supplies the second measurement and shows how it changes the verdict. Any answer that commits to 'keep' or 'discard' without that conditional has skipped the author's actual claim.
Note how the candidate's habit would misfire here: options repeating '41 seconds' or '30 percent' are restating evidence, not stating a conclusion.
2. Evaluate this answer option: 'The vendor deliberately misled the battalion about time savings.' Is it supported?
Read the worked answer
Not supported - it overreaches.
The passage establishes only that the promised 30 percent reduction did not materialise on the measured logging task: dispatches take 41 seconds longer, not shorter.
It says nothing about the vendor's intent, what the vendor measured, or whether the promise was a forecast, a marketing estimate, or a deliberate falsehood. 'Deliberately misled' requires evidence of intent that the memo never supplies.
This is exactly the failure mode the candidate keeps committing: a true premise (the promise was not met) is stretched into a claim about motive, and the motive is the part that is not in the text. A defensible answer stays at 'the promised savings were not realised in the measured task.'
3. What does the phrase 'counting keystrokes alone' imply about the people who make that criticism?
Read the worked answer
The phrase is mildly critical and it does its work through the word alone.
- Literal content: some critics measure only the time spent entering data.
- Implication: that metric is incomplete, because it omits a real cost the system removes - lost paperwork and misfiled dispatches, one of which used to consume a clerk's afternoon.
- Attitude: the author treats these critics as accurate but narrow. They are not accused of dishonesty or of inventing the 41 seconds; they are accused of using a partial yardstick.
The contrast in the final sentence ('look like a failure' vs. 'look like a modest success') confirms that the author sees the critics' conclusion as an artefact of their measurement choice, not a lie.