Goal: Emphasize a Similarity

These questions give you a set of notes and a stated goal, and your job is picking the sentence that best meets that goal, not just any true sentence. For a similarity goal, the notes almost always mix shared details with details that only belong to one subject. A sentence listing what each subject did separately, even in the same breath, is a contrast or a summary, not a similarity. The correct answer has to collapse two subjects into one shared claim.

The mechanism is simple once you see it: words like both, like, and share are doing grammatical work, forcing one predicate to apply to two subjects at once. 'Both sculptors weld discarded metal' uses one verb phrase for two people, which is exactly what a similarity claim needs. Compare that to naming two different works in one sentence, say a mural made of tile and another made of glass. That sentence mentions both items, but it reports two different facts side by side. Nothing is shared. The eye catches the word 'both' in the setup and assumes the sentence must be doing similarity work, but the content has to match the word.

This skill sits right next to its sibling goal, emphasizing a difference, and the two are tested back to back precisely so you check the goal line twice. The harder version drops a shared measurement and instead gives you a shared category with two different specific behaviors underneath it, like two animals that both stay wet out of water but do it by different methods. There the similarity is the shared strategy, stated at the level that covers both specifics, not either specific alone.