Goal Questions: Suppose the Writer Had Wanted To (TOD 303, 503, 702)

Every answer choice to a goal question starts with Yes or No, because the question only has one real decision: did this essay, as written, accomplish the stated goal. The four choices then split into two Yes reasons and two No reasons, but the reasons only matter once you've picked a side. So the move is to settle Yes or No first, using nothing but your sense of what the essay is actually about, and only then read the reasons to find the one that matches your own thinking.

The test here is a mismatch test. You're given an essay built for one purpose, then handed a different, specific goal, and asked whether the essay happens to clear that bar anyway. Most of the time it doesn't, because the essay was never built to. A narrative about a bakery's day was built to narrate a day, not to teach a process; an essay that reports a tree-planting was built to report, not to argue. The giveaway word that tricks people is overlap: the goal's vocabulary might show up inside the essay without the essay ever doing what the goal demands.

This is why goal questions always arrive last, as whole-passage questions, after you've handled every sentence-level item. They ask you to step back and judge the essay's overall shape and purpose, the same skill the other whole-passage questions use. The harder version shows up when the essay is long and covers several things: then the goal is usually narrow, and your job is to check whether that one narrow thing is what the essay is actually doing, not just one topic it brushes past.