Completing the Text with a Logical Conclusion

This question type hands you a passage missing its last clause and four endings. It looks like a vocabulary or style question, but it is really a logic question wearing a fill-in-the-blank costume. The test is checking whether you can draw an inference: a claim not stated outright but required by what is stated. You cannot find this ending by picking whatever sounds smart or scientific. You find it by treating every sentence before the blank as a solid block of fact, stacking those blocks, and reading off what the top block has to be if everything beneath it is true.

Picture the stack. Each stated fact is a solid box sitting on the one before it. The correct ending is a dotted box balanced on top, one step past the last solid fact but resting entirely on it. If a fact gets pulled out of the stack, the dotted box can wobble or fall; an inference that depended on firing temperature data disappears if that data turns out false, which is why evidence selection and inference sit right next to each other in this unit. Wrong answers usually add a new box from outside the text, bring in an opinion, or overreach past what the stack can hold.

This skill is the mirror image of identifying a central claim: there you compress many facts into one idea already in the text, here you extend the facts one logical step beyond the text. Both depend on treating every sentence as evidence first, interpretation second.