Section I · method
About ninety seconds a question, on passages chosen because they are unfamiliar. Everything below exists to stop you doing the thing that feels productive and is not: reading it all again.
Before the passage
Reading the question before the text sounds like a gimmick. It is the largest single saving available, because a passage read with a purpose only gets read once.
Read the stem alone, without the options. Options are written to be plausible, and taking in four plausible statements before you have a view of your own is how people end up picking the most agreeable one.
Then form a one-line answer in your own words and find the option that matches it. If nothing matches, something has been misread, and rereading the stem is quicker than talking yourself into an option.
Question types
Identify which one you are being asked before you read a single option.
Main idea
The right answer describes the whole passage. The usual trap describes one paragraph accurately, most often the last, because it is freshest.
Inference
What must be true given the text. If you need a fact from outside the passage to justify it, it is wrong.
Tone and attitude
Look at the adjectives and the verbs of attribution. Expect two-part answers, since passages worth setting are rarely wholehearted. Watch for irony, where a sentence says the opposite of what the paragraph around it means.
Function
What job does this sentence do? Name the move: concedes, qualifies, illustrates, forestalls an objection, restates for emphasis. Naming it usually collapses the options to one.
Distractors
They are engineered, and they come in a small number of shapes.
True but not asked
An accurate statement that does not answer the stem. Tempting precisely because you can verify it.
Right scope, wrong extent
The passage says often; the option says always. Words like all, never, proves and only deserve a second look, though not automatic rejection.
Half right
A perfect first clause and a wrong second one. Examiners put the flaw late on purpose, so read to the end of every option.
Your own opinion
A sensible worldly view the passage never expresses. If you catch yourself agreeing rather than checking, stop.
The position being refused
A view the author raises in order to reject. Passages that concede before arguing throw these off constantly.
Pace
Sixty-two questions in a hundred minutes. Some stimuli carry four or five questions, and those are where time is won, since the reading is spread across them. A single-question stimulus that is fighting you is worth abandoning. There is no negative marking, so a guess always beats a blank.
On reading widely: it is the advice everyone gives and it does very little on a six-week horizon. You cannot make yourself well-read by March, and the section tests four moves rather than how much you have read. Practising those moves against timed passages is what shifts the score.