Skill 2.A Questions: Choosing the Best Introduction or Conclusion Sentence

These questions give you a paragraph and four candidate sentences, then ask which one best opens or closes it. The stem usually asks for a sentence that is interesting and that introduces the topic. That wording sets up two separate tests. An option can be lively and still fail if it never points at what the paragraph is actually about. An option can be accurate and on-topic and still fail if it reads like a dry summary nobody would keep reading. The winning sentence has to clear both bars at once, not just one.

This is why the most fact-packed option is rarely the answer, and why length is a trap. A forty-word sentence crammed with dates, names, and numbers looks thorough, but thoroughness is not the criterion. The question is whether that sentence does the job of an opener or closer for this specific paragraph: setting up the idea the paragraph develops, or landing the point it was building toward. A short sentence that names the paragraph's real subject in a surprising way beats a long one that lists details without framing them.

This skill sits next to the related task of picking the best transition or best revision for a sentence already in a paragraph. All of these questions reward the same habit: read the whole paragraph first, decide in your own words what it is actually doing, and only then test each option against that job description. Skip that step and vivid, well-written distractors will pull you toward sentences that simply belong to a different paragraph.