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Verbal Reasoning: Reading Comprehension

Half the measure: passages from one paragraph to five, three answer formats, and every reading skill ETS names, from major points to alternative explanations.

18 topics · 71 questions

Each topic is a path, not a menu: work down it in order and every question builds on the one above. Click any of them to watch the answer draw itself.

Select One Answer Choice

  1. How it worksHow do you compress a question stem into a one-line demand before reading a single answer choice?
  2. How it worksHow does eliminating on scope, extremity and direction kill four choices faster than verifying one?
  3. Worked exampleWalk me through picking among five options when the stem asks the primary purpose of a paragraph on a failed 1890s wheat cartel.
  4. Going furtherWhat changes when a stem asks what the author would most likely agree with instead of what the text states?
Your turnmedium1 of 3
Passage: In 1894 a consortium of 28 wheat growers agreed to withhold grain until prices recovered. Within a season the agreement collapsed. Historians once attributed the failure to falling demand, but ledgers recovered from two member firms show that demand held steady while individual members quietly sold at the higher price the withholding had produced. The cartel was undone not by the market it faced but by the incentives it created among its own members. The primary purpose of the passage is to:

Select One or More of Exactly Three

  1. How it worksHow do you judge each of three statements against the text alone rather than against the other two?
  2. Worked exampleWalk me through judging three claims about a study where rainfall rose while crop yields fell, keeping only the supported ones.
  3. Common mistakeWhy doesn't the number of correct statements have to be two, or any number you could guess in advance?
  4. Going furtherWhat happens to your odds when two of three statements are certain and the third is a coin toss?
Your turnhard1 of 3
Passage: Across the 16 districts studied, annual rainfall rose by 19 percent over the decade while cereal yields fell. Soil surveys taken in the same districts recorded a steady loss of topsoil. Statement 1: Rainfall rose in the districts studied. Statement 2: Loss of topsoil caused the fall in yields. Statement 3: Yields fell despite a rise in rainfall. Which statements are supported by the passage?

Select-in-Passage

  1. How it worksHow do you turn a description like 'the sentence that qualifies the author's claim' into a concrete search key?
  2. Common mistakeWhy isn't the longest or most quotable sentence the one such a question usually wants?
  3. Worked exampleShow me finding the sentence that first concedes a weakness in a four-sentence argument about urban tree cover.
  4. Going furtherWhat changes when two sentences match the description and only one sits in the paragraph the question names?
Your turnmedium1 of 3
Passage: (1) The restoration added 151 hectares of canopy to the city's older districts. (2) Summer surface temperatures in those districts fell measurably within 7 years. (3) The gain, however, was concentrated in streets that were already the greenest, so the districts with least cover benefited least. (4) Planners now treat placement as a separate problem from planting volume. Click the sentence in which the author first concedes a weakness in the restoration.

Passage Lengths, Subjects and Question Sets

  1. How it worksHow do you budget reading time across a passage set when the questions outnumber the paragraphs?
  2. Going furtherWhat changes about your reading when the subject is a physics result rather than an art-history argument?
  3. Common mistakeWhy doesn't unfamiliar subject matter make a science passage harder than a familiar one on a verbal section?
Your turneasy1 of 3
A verbal section contains a passage set with 5 questions. A test taker allows 5 minutes to read the passage and then has 9 minutes left for the set. Find the average number of seconds available for each of its questions.

Understanding the Meaning of Individual Words

  1. How it worksHow do a sentence's constraints rotate a word's meaning until only one sense survives?
  2. How it worksWalk me through substituting your own word for the tested one before you look at any choice.
  3. Worked exampleShow me deciding what 'qualify' means in 'The findings qualify, rather than overturn, the standard account.'
  4. Common mistakeWhy isn't the commonest dictionary meaning the answer to a word-in-context question?
Your turnmedium1 of 3
Passage: The 45 new measurements qualify, rather than overturn, the standard account: the account's central prediction survives, while its claims about the first 14 years require adjustment. In the passage, qualify most nearly means:

Understanding the Meaning of Individual Sentences

  1. How it worksHow do you locate the main subject and main verb of a sentence buried under clauses?
  2. Worked exampleWalk me through unpacking 'That the practice persisted despite the bans suggests enforcement was uneven' into who did what.
  3. Going furtherWhat happens to the meaning when a negation attaches to a whole clause instead of to one verb?
  4. Common mistakeWhy doesn't rereading a dense sentence at the same speed help, and what should replace the reread?
Your turnmedium1 of 3
Sentence: That the practice persisted in 7 of the 24 provinces despite the bans suggests that enforcement was uneven. What does the sentence claim?

Understanding Larger Bodies of Text

  1. How it worksHow do you build a one-line statement of a passage's point while reading rather than afterwards?
  2. Common mistakeWhy isn't the topic of a passage the same thing as its main point?
  3. How it worksHow do the opening sentences of successive paragraphs combine into the whole argument?
  4. Worked exampleShow me stating the point of a paragraph that describes a theory, lists two failures, then proposes a repair.
Your turnhard1 of 3
Passage: A theory of coastal settlement held that villages moved inland as sea levels rose. Two difficulties have emerged: 12 of the 32 excavated sites show continuous occupation, and radiocarbon dates from the inland sites run earlier than the theory allows. A revised version, in which inland movement responds to soil exhaustion instead, accommodates both. The main point of the passage is that:

Distinguishing Major From Minor Points

  1. How it worksHow do you draw a passage as a hierarchy where minor points visibly hang off the major ones?
  2. Worked exampleWalk me through ranking four claims about a river restoration into one major point and three supporting details.
  3. Going furtherWhat happens to that hierarchy when an example runs two paragraphs and dwarfs the claim it supports?
  4. Common mistakeWhy isn't the amount of space an idea gets a reliable measure of how important it is?
Your turnmedium1 of 3
Passage: Removing the weir restored spawning runs on 46 kilometres of river. Two paragraphs of the report describe a single riverside farm whose access road had to be rerouted at a cost of 144 thousand pounds. The report concludes that weir removal is the most effective restoration measure available. Which is the major point?

Summarizing a Passage

  1. How it worksHow do you test a candidate summary for scope by drawing it as a circle over the passage's own circle?
  2. Worked exampleShow me choosing between a too-narrow and a too-broad summary of a paragraph on vaccine hesitancy.
  3. Common mistakeWhy isn't the longest and most detailed choice usually the best summary?
Your turnmedium1 of 3
Passage: Vaccine hesitancy in the district rose from 12 percent to 26 percent over three years. Surveys attribute most of the rise to distrust of the clinics rather than to doubts about the vaccines themselves. A pilot that moved vaccination into schools reversed part of the rise. Which is the best summary?

Drawing Conclusions

  1. How it worksHow do you chain two stated facts into a conclusion without smuggling in a third fact of your own?
  2. Worked exampleWalk me through concluding from 'every member voted yes' and 'Ruiz is a member' without taking one step more.
  3. Common mistakeWhy doesn't 'most experts agree' license the conclusion that a claim is true?
  4. Going furtherWhat changes when a text states a correlation and every answer choice offers a cause?
Your turneasy1 of 3
Passage: Every one of the 20 members of the committee voted yes. Ruiz is a member of the committee. What follows?

Reasoning From Incomplete Data

  1. How it worksHow do you draw stated facts as solid boxes and an inference as a dotted box exactly one step beyond?
  2. How it worksHow do you tell one step beyond the text apart from two steps off the edge of it?
  3. Worked exampleShow me the safe inference from 'The ban halved legal sales, though smuggling rose' and the over-reach beside it.
  4. Common mistakeWhy isn't an inference just a guess that happens to sound reasonable?
Your turnhard1 of 3
Passage: The ban halved legal sales of the compound within 7 years, though smuggling of it rose over the same period. Which inference is safe?

Understanding the Structure of a Text

  1. How it worksHow do you grow an outline as a passage scrolls: claim, counterclaim, evidence, concession?
  2. How it worksHow do you label a paragraph by the job it does instead of by the content it carries?
  3. Worked exampleWalk me through mapping a passage that opens with a consensus view, undercuts it, then rescues part of it.
  4. Going furtherWhat changes about a passage's shape when the author's own view arrives only in the final sentence?
  5. Ties togetherHow does a passage outline connect to the signal words that steer a text completion sentence?
Your turnmedium1 of 3
Passage: Paragraph 1 sets out the consensus that trade routes shifted after 687. Paragraph 2 reports 21 coin hoards inconsistent with that date. Paragraph 3 concedes that the hoards are hard to date closely, then argues that even a wide margin leaves the consensus untenable. What is the passage's shape?

Identifying the Author's Assumptions

  1. How it worksHow do you find the missing block that premises need in order to hold up a conclusion?
  2. Worked exampleShow me the assumption behind 'Sales rose after the redesign, so the redesign worked', drawn as a missing block.
  3. Common mistakeWhy isn't every unstated fact around an argument one of that argument's assumptions?
  4. Going furtherWhat happens to an argument when its assumption is stated out loud and turns out to be false?
Your turnhard1 of 3
Argument: Sales rose by 23 percent in the 9 months after the redesign, so the redesign worked. Which assumption does the argument need?

Identifying the Author's Perspective

  1. How it worksHow do word choice, hedging and concession reveal a stance with no first-person word anywhere?
  2. How it worksHow do you place an author's attitude on a dial running from admiring through neutral to scornful?
  3. Worked exampleShow me placing the tone of 'The scheme was ingenious, if one ignores who paid for it' on that dial.
  4. Common mistakeWhy isn't an author who describes a theory carefully thereby endorsing it?
Your turnmedium1 of 3
Sentence: The scheme was ingenious, if one ignores the 3543 households who paid for it. Where does the author's attitude sit?

Analyzing a Text and Reaching Conclusions About It

  1. How it worksHow do you decide whether a paragraph argues, reports, compares or corrects, and why do the answers change?
  2. Worked exampleShow me deciding whether a paragraph on two rival dating methods reports a dispute or settles it.
  3. Going furtherWhat changes when the evidence in a text would support a conclusion the author never draws?
Your turnmedium1 of 3
Passage: Method A dates the deposit to about 5393 years ago and method B to about 8298. Each rests on assumptions the other does not share. Specialists continue to use both. What does the paragraph DO?

Identifying Strengths and Weaknesses of a Position

  1. How it worksHow does new information strengthen an argument by shoring up the block it was missing?
  2. How it worksHow do you weaken an argument by attacking its assumption rather than disputing its evidence?
  3. Worked exampleWalk me through weakening 'Cities that added bike lanes saw fewer crashes, so bike lanes cut crashes.'
  4. Common mistakeWhy doesn't a fact that makes a conclusion less pleasant actually weaken the argument for it?
  5. Going furtherWhat changes when a choice attacks a premise the argument never needed in the first place?
Your turnhard1 of 3
Argument: Cities that added bike lanes recorded 24 percent fewer crashes over 6 years, so bike lanes cut crashes. Which would most weaken it?

Developing and Considering Alternative Explanations

  1. How it worksHow do you generate a rival cause for a correlation before you read any answer choice?
  2. Worked exampleShow me two rival explanations for 'Towns with more libraries have higher test scores' and how to test each.
  3. Going furtherWhat happens to a rival explanation when the study is randomized rather than merely observational?
  4. Common mistakeWhy isn't a rival explanation defeated by the fact that the author's explanation is also plausible?
Your turnhard1 of 3
Passage: Towns with more than 5 libraries per ten thousand residents record higher school test scores than towns with fewer. Which is the strongest rival explanation?

Short Argument Paragraphs

  1. How it worksHow do you split a short argument into premises, conclusion and the glue holding them together?
  2. Worked exampleWalk me through 'Coffee drinkers live longer, therefore coffee extends life' and name what the argument is missing.
  3. Common mistakeWhy isn't the last sentence of a short argument always the conclusion?
  4. Ties togetherHow does spotting a conclusion indicator connect to reading a direction signal in a completion sentence?
Your turnmedium1 of 3
Argument: In a cohort of 6875 adults followed for 23 years, coffee drinkers lived longer than non-drinkers. Therefore coffee extends life. What is the argument missing?

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