SAT® · Reading and Writing: Information and Ideas
Which Finding Would Support the Hypothesis
These questions give you a hypothesis and ask which finding would support (or weaken) it. The trick is to predict the exact result the hypothesis demands before you look at the choices.
A hypothesis is a claim about cause and effect, and any decent hypothesis makes a prediction: if the claim is true, some specific measurable thing should happen. A passage about a dinosaur's back sail is really handing you a science experiment wrapped in prose. Strip out the dinosaur details and you're left with a claim and a test, exactly like a claim in a lab report. Your job is the same either way: figure out what result the claim demands, then see which answer choice delivers it.
Before reading the choices, build the result yourself. Take the hypothesis, say it helped a swimming predator turn sharply after prey, and ask what a turning aid should do to a turn. It should make it shorter or faster. Now you have a target. Scan the four choices for the one that reports that exact outcome, not just something vaguely related. This matters because many wrong choices are merely consistent with the hypothesis: they could happen whether the hypothesis is true or false. A choice that fits twenty other explanations just as well gives weak support. The strongest choice is the one the hypothesis specifically predicts and that a false hypothesis would struggle to produce.
Weaken questions flip the same tool. Instead of hunting for the predicted result showing up, hunt for it failing to show up exactly where the hypothesis says it should be strongest. This topic sits inside evidence questions generally: the same instinct, predict first, then match, works whether the passage hands you a text claim needing a quotation or a data claim needing a number.
Key terms
- Hypothesis
- A proposed explanation for why something happens, stated clearly enough to generate a testable prediction.
- Prediction
- The specific, measurable outcome a hypothesis implies should occur if the hypothesis is true.
- Support
- A finding that matches the hypothesis's predicted outcome, making the hypothesis more likely to be correct.
- Weaken
- A finding showing the predicted outcome is missing or reversed exactly where the hypothesis says it should appear.
- Merely consistent
- A finding that could occur whether the hypothesis is true or false, so it fails to strongly support it.
Watch it explained
- How it worksHow does a hypothesis become a prediction you can test each of four findings against?
- How it worksWalk me through building the result an experiment should produce before reading a single answer choice.
- Common mistakeWhy doesn't a finding that is merely consistent with a hypothesis support it as strongly as one it predicts?
- Worked exampleFind which model result supports the idea that a back sail helped a swimming predator chase fast, swerving prey.
- Going furtherWhat changes about the four findings when a stem asks which one would weaken the hypothesis instead?
Check yourself
End of topic.