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CARS: Reading Method, Traps and Pacing

How to read 550 words of dense argument in six minutes, keep the author's voice separate from everyone else's, and not run out of clock.

7 topics · 30 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.

Reading a Dense Humanities Passage in Six Minutes

  1. How it worksHow do you read 550 words of dense argument in six minutes and come away with a usable map of it?
  2. How it worksHow do you decide mid-paragraph that a sentence is decoration and can be crossed at full speed?
  3. Worked exampleWalk me through the six-minute budget for a 570-word CARS text with seven questions attached to it.
  4. Common mistakeWhy doesn't highlighting as you read make a dense text easier to answer questions about?
Your turneasy1 of 3
A CARS passage runs 577 words and you have budgeted 6 minutes to read it once before looking at any question. What reading rate, in words per minute, does that budget demand?

The Voice Inventory: Author vs Reported Views

  1. How it worksHow do you keep two separate tracks while reading, one for the author's view and one for views they describe?
  2. How it worksHow do verbs like claims, concedes and insists mark whose voice a sentence actually belongs to?
  3. Worked exampleWalk me through assigning voices in scholars long held that guilds stifled trade; the ledgers say otherwise.
  4. Common mistakeWhy isn't a sentence the author's own position just because it appears without quotation marks?
  5. Going furtherWhat changes when an author reports a rival view sympathetically for two paragraphs before rejecting it?
Your turneasy1 of 3
Passage. Scholars long held that the guilds stifled trade, and for 75 years the claim was repeated without examination. The ledgers say otherwise: in the 9 towns for which continuous accounts survive, volumes rose through the guild period and fell after it. Question: which position belongs to the author?

The Pivot Where the Author's Own Position Arrives

  1. How it worksHow do you find the pivot in a text that spends three paragraphs setting up a view it is about to reject?
  2. Worked exampleWalk me through locating the turn in for a century this was orthodoxy, and then the excavations of 1994 arrived.
  3. Common mistakeWhy doesn't every however in a piece of writing mark the author's real turn?
  4. Going furtherWhat happens when a text has two pivots and the second one walks back part of the first?
Your turneasy1 of 3
Passage. For a century this was orthodoxy, taught in every handbook and repeated in the 10 editions of the standard survey. And then the excavations of 1985 arrived. The trench cut through what the orthodoxy said was open ground and found 6 metres of occupation deposit. Question: where does the author's own position begin?

Why Prior Knowledge Is a Liability Here

  1. How it worksHow does outside knowledge sneak into an answer choice and make a wrong option feel obviously right?
  2. Worked exampleWalk me through rejecting a factually correct statement about Freud that the author in front of you would not endorse.
  3. Common mistakeWhy isn't it safe to fill a gap in an argument with a fact you happen to be certain about?
  4. Going furtherWhat changes when a CARS text states something about your own field that you know to be out of date?
Your turnmedium1 of 3
Passage. The author, writing about dream reports collected from 93 patients over 15 years, treats Freud as a stylist rather than a scientist: the case histories are read as narrative constructions, their persuasiveness traced to the ordering of episodes and the withholding of the analyst's own doubts. Whether the underlying theory is true is a question the author says is not being asked here. Question: which statement would the author endorse?

Why Extreme Answers Usually Lose

  1. How it worksHow does one absolute word raise the burden of proof on an answer beyond what any text can supply?
  2. Common mistakeWhy isn't the safest-sounding, most heavily hedged answer automatically the correct one either?
  3. Worked exampleWalk me through choosing between the author questions the method and the author rejects the method entirely.
  4. Going furtherWhat changes when an author's own language is extreme and an absolute answer then matches the writing?
Your turneasy1 of 3
Passage. The author examines a method used in 69 published studies and observes that its results are stable when the sample exceeds 7 hundred and erratic below that. The method is described as useful within limits that its practitioners rarely state. Question: which description of the author's view is best supported?

True in the World, Wrong for the Passage

  1. How it worksHow do you tell a CARS answer that is true in the world from one that is true for the text you just read?
  2. Worked exampleWalk me through eliminating vaccines prevent disease as an answer to a question about public trust in medicine.
  3. Common mistakeWhy doesn't a question asking what an author would agree with invite your own judgement of the facts?
  4. Going furtherWhat happens when a true-in-the-world statement also happens to be supported by the writing itself?
Your turneasy1 of 3
Passage. Public trust in medicine, the author argues, is not built on outcomes. It fell in the 1991 decade while outcomes improved on 8 of the 14 measures then collected, and it has recovered in places where outcomes stagnated. What moves it is whether people believe the institution is acting on their behalf. Question: which answer does the passage support?

Pacing Nine Passages in Ninety Minutes

  1. How it worksHow does a ten-minute-per-passage budget split between reading the text and answering its questions?
  2. Worked exampleFind where you should be on the clock after passage five when nine passages must fit into ninety minutes.
  3. How it worksHow do you decide to abandon a question and flag it rather than spend another ninety seconds on it?
  4. Common mistakeWhy doesn't saving the hardest-looking passage for the very end save you time overall?
  5. Going furtherWhat changes about pacing when you have already lost four minutes on the second passage?
Your turneasy1 of 3
CARS runs 90 minutes for 9 passages. You want to be through passage number 6 exactly on an even pace. How many minutes should have elapsed at that point?

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