Section I
Material chosen because it is unfamiliar, at ninety-seven seconds a question. The instinct is to read faster. People who score well tend to read less, having worked out what they are looking for before they start.
Working a passage in ninety seconds, the four question types that cover almost everything, and the five ways a wrong answer gets itself chosen.
The method →Then drill14 stimuli covering argumentative prose, verse, survey data and dialogue, with every distractor explained rather than only the key.
42 questions →The four types
Work out which one you are being asked before you look at the options. It changes what counts as evidence, and turns the task from choosing an answer into eliminating three.
Main idea
What is the author doing, in one sentence? Right answers describe the whole passage; wrong answers describe one true paragraph of it.
Inference
What must follow from the text — not what is likely, not what you happen to believe. If you need a fact from outside the passage, it is the wrong answer.
Tone & attitude
How does the author feel about the thing being discussed? Watch for irony, and for passages that criticise both sides rather than one.
Function
What job does this sentence or paragraph do for the argument? Concede, qualify, illustrate, forestall an objection — name the move.
Data
Read the axis, read the units, then ask what the numbers cannot establish. Most wrong answers over-read a real trend into a cause.
Habit
After you answer, ask why the option you nearly chose was written. Distractors are engineered: true but irrelevant, right about one paragraph, right but overstated.
The shapes repeat across every passage you will see, whereas the content of any one passage never comes up again. That is the whole argument for reviewing slowly and practising fast.