Section I: 55 Questions, 60 Minutes, Five Passage Sets

The section is built from five passage sets, each holding somewhere between 8 and 13 questions, and together they add up to 55 questions in 60 minutes. That average of about a minute a question has to cover both reading the passage and answering every question tied to it, which is why the real budget per question, once reading is subtracted, is under a minute. A set with 11 questions might get roughly 11 to 13 minutes total, with several of those minutes spent just getting through the passage before a single question is touched.

Because the five sets are not identical in length, the time budget for each one is not identical either. A 13-question set earns more minutes than an 8-question set, so pacing has to be set per passage, not treated as one flat rate across the whole section. The payoff of working this way is that a skipped or rushed question costs almost nothing to guess on, since there is no penalty for a wrong answer, but a skipped passage costs minutes that cannot be recovered without cutting into the next set.

This pacing logic connects directly to what the questions themselves ask. Many of the function stems about character, setting, structure and narration require rereading a few lines before answering, and that rereading is exactly what a slipped clock makes impossible. If one passage runs long, especially a dense older prose passage, the fix is never to slow down on it further. The debt gets repaid by moving faster through the easier sets that follow, since every question in the section is still worth answering.