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Critical Analysis and Reasoning Skills: The Section and Its Passages

The only MCAT section with no science in it: 53 questions, 9 passages, 90 minutes, and everything you need already sitting in the text.

5 topics · 20 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.

The CARS Blueprint: 53 Questions, 9 Passages, 90 Minutes

  1. How it worksHow do 53 CARS questions divide across 9 passages when each passage carries only 5 to 7 of them?
  2. Worked exampleFind the average seconds per CARS question when 53 questions share 90 minutes, and show what that leaves for reading.
  3. Common mistakeWhy isn't CARS just the verbal section of the SAT with harder vocabulary in it?
  4. Going furtherWhat changes about your approach when a CARS passage runs 600 words instead of 500?
Your turneasy1 of 3
CARS gives you 90 minutes for 9 passages. You have finished passage number 5 and the clock shows 49 minutes used. How many minutes are left for each passage you have not yet started?

Everything You Need Is in the Passage

  1. How it worksHow does a CARS question hand you every premise it needs so that no outside fact can ever be required?
  2. Common mistakeWhy doesn't knowing a great deal about medieval history help you on a CARS passage about medieval history?
  3. Worked exampleWalk me through answering what an author means by sprezzatura when one sentence of text is the only definition offered.
  4. Going furtherWhat changes when an author defines a technical term in a way that contradicts its normal dictionary meaning?
Your turnmedium1 of 3
Passage. In the workshops of the 15th century the word finish did not mean what a modern gallery means by it. A finished panel was not one whose surface had been brought to an even gloss; it was one that had been released, signed off by the master, carried out of the shop and thereby placed beyond revision. A panel could leave with its underdrawing still visible and be finished. Another could be worked for 7 weeks and remain unfinished, because no release had been given. The distinction was financial as much as aesthetic: payment fell due at release, not at the moment the paint stopped moving. Modern conservators, reading the gallery sense back into the contracts, have described such panels as abandoned and restored them toward a smoothness nobody in the workshop intended. The records themselves drift, and by the 18th century the same word appears in contracts meaning surface quality. For the earlier period the older sense holds. Question: as the passage uses it, finish most nearly means

The 50/50 Humanities and Social Sciences Split

  1. How it worksHow does a social science passage build its case from evidence while a humanities one builds it from ideas?
  2. Worked exampleWalk me through classifying a piece on how museum architecture shapes visitor behaviour as humanities or social science.
  3. Going furtherWhat happens to a studies-of-diverse-cultures text that could be filed under either humanities or social sciences?
Your turnhard1 of 3
Passage. Excavation produced 12 hearths, and their spacing is the argument. Domestic hearths in the region's later villages sit about 14 metres apart, one to a household, and that distance holds across three centuries. Here they cluster at under half the spacing, in a single arc, with no partition between them. The excavators read the arc as evidence that cooking was communal before it was domestic, and that the household as a unit of consumption postdates the village as a unit of settlement. The inference does not rest on spacing alone. Animal bone is spread evenly along the arc rather than piled at any one hearth, which is what a shared carcass leaves and not what 12 separate meals leave. A rival reading takes the arc as seasonal, a summer arrangement by a group that broke into households each winter; against it stands the absence of any dispersed hearth pattern anywhere in the excavated ground. Question: this passage is best classified as

Tone and Word Choice Across the Two Passage Types

  1. How it worksHow does an opinionated humanities author put their judgement into adjectives rather than into stated claims?
  2. How it worksHow do you read tone as a signal of purpose when a satirical piece looks at first like light entertainment?
  3. Worked exampleWalk me through what a curiously insistent devotion to symmetry tells you about an author's attitude to a building.
  4. Common mistakeWhy isn't a factual, neutral-sounding social science text automatically free of the author's point of view?
Your turnmedium1 of 3
Passage. The new wing has been praised for its restraint, and restraint it certainly has. Every window on the 6-storey front is the same window. The cornice line is held to within 5 millimetres along its whole length, a tolerance the builders were evidently proud of, and the architect has spoken about it in 19 separate interviews. Nothing in the elevation is allowed to surprise. One admires the discipline in the way one admires a person who has never once raised their voice, and one wonders, in the same way, what it cost. The older galleries next door are a muddle of periods and they are where the visitors linger. That may be sentimentality on their part. It may also be that a building which forbids itself any accident forbids its occupants one too. Question: the author's attitude toward the new wing is best described as

Passage Structure: Claim, Counterclaim, Evidence, Concession

  1. How it worksHow do you build an outline as you read, one move per paragraph, instead of trying to remember sentences?
  2. How it worksHow does a chronological history text differ in shape from a point-and-counterpoint political science one?
  3. Worked exampleWalk me through mapping a text that opens with a popular belief, concedes one point to it, then dismantles it.
  4. Common mistakeWhy doesn't underlining every important-looking sentence give you the structure of what you just read?
  5. Going furtherWhat changes about your outline when the author's real thesis only arrives in the final sentence?
Your turnmedium1 of 3
Passage, one move per paragraph. (1) It is widely held that the 18th-century expansion of the postal network is what created a reading public. (2) The claim has something behind it: delivery points rose from about 5 hundred to about 29 hundred in forty years, and periodical subscriptions rose with them. (3) But subscription lists were kept by towns that already had booksellers, and the towns that gained delivery first were the towns that already had readers. (4) The network followed demand rather than making it. (5) None of which means the post was idle: once in place it made a national periodical possible where a regional one had been the ceiling. Question: which paragraph carries the author's concession to the view being opposed?

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