The Two-Genre Passage Taxonomy

The reading section used to run on four labeled passage types in a fixed order: a story, a social science piece, a humanities piece, and a natural science piece. The enhanced version keeps the subject matter but drops it down to two genres. Literary Narrative covers stories, memoirs, personal essays, anything built around a narrator's voice and lived experience. Informational covers everything else: natural science, social science, humanities, any passage built to explain or argue rather than narrate.

That two-way split changes what a question is allowed to lean on. A Literary Narrative question can ask about tone, a narrator's shifting feelings, or what a line implies about character. An Informational question leans on structure, evidence, and how claims get supported, regardless of whether the subject is coral larvae or Renaissance painting. Knowing which genre you are in tells you what kind of reasoning the questions will reward before you read a single question stem.

This matters most for planning. There are three scored passages, nine questions each, and the old guarantee of order is gone. A prep book that still promises Prose Fiction first and Natural Science last is describing a retired format. Since any form can open with an informational set and close with a narrative, or mix a paired informational passage into the middle, the move is to read what's actually printed on the page and sort it into its genre on the spot, rather than trusting a blueprint from memory.