Author Inference Questions

[ms08g]

A particular subtype of question in the RC section that has been giving me a hard time are the "Based on the information in the passage, the author would be most likely to agree with..." questions in which the ACs all appear to have been mentioned in the passage or can be inferred from it and two in particular seem to be advocated by the author. A lot of the time you can go back after grading the test and pick out a keyword or two that seem to prove that the author advocates one thing 100% and another just slightly. Do you have a particular method for attacking these questions quickly and efficiently? A lot of the time it seems like a time suck to go back and find every AC in the passage, and many times the ACs aren't directly reference in the passage.

[chike_eze]

A particular subtype of question in the RC section that has been giving me a hard time are the "Based on the information in the passage, the author would be most likely to agree with..."

Wow, you read my mind exactly! I'm about to post a RC strategy question related to this issue. These questions require us to make an inference based on a particular section/sections of the passage.

> My issue: I don't think I have an effective mapping strategy so I know where to go back to for detail!

I'll be checking back to read responses to this important post.

Thanks

[bbirdwell]

A lot of the time it seems like a time suck to go back and find every AC in the passage

Exactly. You should avoid checking every answer choice. The biggest difference between masters and folks who are "pretty good" at RC is not the speed at which they read the passages -- it's the speed at which they eliminate answer choices.

My goal when working through these problems is to make as many problems as possible 2-choice or 3-choice problems. Very rarely is a problem actually a legitimate 5-choice spread.

How? By eliminating answers based on what I know about the BIG PICTURE of the author's position. For those of you using our strategy guides, you know that the foundation of our approach is building a mental picture of the Scale -- the two sides at issue, and where the author stands.

This is not a rote activity, to be checked off, completed, and then forgotten. It's the bedrock of the THOUGHT PROCESS we use to answer questions correctly.

Most of these questions have 2 or 3 answer choices that can be eliminated immediately because they place the author's opinion on the wrong side.

Another important consideration is the speed at which you approach the other questions in the section. Sometimes, you will have to go back and dig around in the passage. Sometimes, you'll have to do that for 4 or 5 choices.

It's of utmost importance, then, that you absolutely maximize your speed on all other, easier, simpler questions. If you waste 5 seconds per choice double-checking something that you do not need to double check, and you do that on 4 questions, you have wasted almost TWO MINUTES that you could have used on more complex or work-intensive problems such as the ones you are describing.

You need not worry so much about going faster on hard questions if you go as fast as you really can on easy ones!