Cause-and-Effect Across a Whole Passage

A passage read straight through hides its causal wiring. The opening paragraph plants a cause, the middle paragraphs carry it forward without naming it as a cause, and the closing paragraph delivers an effect that only makes sense if you remember the opening. A linear reader experiences three separate scenes. A reader hunting cause and effect draws an arrow from paragraph one to paragraph three and asks what carried the force across the gap.

The trick is to hold the chain as a short list of links, not as paragraph content. Read each paragraph and ask: what changed here, and what did that change make possible next. A tariff protects prices, so acreage expands. Expansion outruns demand, so a surplus builds. The surplus collapses prices below what loans assumed, so mortgages fail. Mortgages fail, so the banks holding them fail too. Each link is a compressed cause-effect pair, and the chain is just those pairs stacked in order. You do not need the exact wording back in the passage, you need the sequence of pairs, which is five words long instead of seven hundred and fifty.

Chains complicate when one link forks. A single cause, cheap freight on a new canal, can push two separate effects down two separate paths: one at the port, one on inland farms. Treat that as one link with two arrows leaving it, not two unrelated chains. This sits next to sequence questions, which ask what happened when, and comparison questions, which ask how two things differ; cause and effect asks why one thing made another happen, which is the question sequence alone cannot answer.