Fact-Selection Questions
How do you answer reading comprehension questions that ask you to find a specific fact?
Find the exact sentence in the passage that supports each answer option before selecting one, and check that it is both true (actually stated in the text) and relevant (it answers the precise question asked, not a nearby but different question). An option can be entirely true and still be the wrong answer if it doesn't respond to what was specifically asked.
The most common question type, and its most common trap
Fact-selection is usually the single most frequent question type in a reading comprehension section. The passages are typically longer and the pool of options often includes several statements that are all individually true — the skill isn't finding a true statement, it's finding the one that precisely answers the question as worded.
Worked example
"What did the oracle warn of?" — with five options each traceable to a different true statement in a passage about an ancient warning, a mistaken killing, and a future hardship.
Every option in a question like this can usually be matched to a real sentence in the text — that's what makes it hard. The deciding factor is whether that sentence is actually a response to an oracle's warning, specifically, rather than simply something bad that happens elsewhere in the passage. An option describing anger at a past killing, however true, isn't a warning if no oracle is attached to it. An option correctly identifying an oracle's warning about future hardship is the one that satisfies both the truth and the relevance test.
True but wrong, wrong but tempting
Two failure patterns account for almost every wrong answer in this question type. First, an option that's true in the text but answers a slightly different question — proof of something, but not proof of this specific thing. Second, an option that sounds plausible and fits the passage's tone, but has no actual sentence supporting it. Before selecting an answer, be able to point to the exact line that proves it — if you can't, it's very likely wrong.
Steps
- Underline the precise wording of the question before reading the options
- For each option, locate the specific sentence in the passage that would prove or disprove it
- Eliminate options that are true elsewhere in the text but don't answer this specific question
- Eliminate options with no direct textual support, however plausible they sound
- Select the option that is both stated in the text and directly answers the question as worded
This is one chapter of the Scholarship & Entrance English Assessment Guide. The complete guide — every technique, collected in one document — is available as a free PDF from the guide's main page.