Section I: 55 Questions, Five Sets, 60 Minutes

Sixty minutes for 55 questions sounds like roughly one minute per question, and that math is what makes the hour feel impossible. But the questions do not arrive alone. They arrive in five clusters, each tied to a single passage, and the reading is a fixed cost the whole cluster shares. Pay for the passage once, then spend the rest of that set's time answering. Split 60 minutes five ways and each set gets about twelve minutes: a few minutes to read, the rest to work through that set's questions.

The five passages are not identical in kind. The section guarantees at least two prose fiction passages and at least two poetry passages, with drama folded into the prose slot when it shows up. That guarantee is a floor, not a fixed count and not a fixed order. A student who assumes the poem always sits fourth, or that exactly two of five will be poetry, is planning around a pattern the section never promised.

The twelve-minutes-per-set budget is a plan, not a cage. One passage will usually fight back harder than the other four, dense syntax, an unfamiliar form, a prose style that takes two reads to settle. When that happens, the fix is not to protect the original pace on the sets that remain. It is to move faster through what is left, because every remaining question still needs an answer on the page. The budget exists so a bad five minutes on one set does not quietly become a bad hour.