Quizzes, exams, and flashcards about Reading — information, ideas and craft: PSAT Reading — one passage, one question.
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The reading half of the Reading and Writing section: two of the four official domains, Information and Ideas and Craft and Structure, which together are a little over half of it.
Each one has its own passage of 25 to 150 words and exactly one question attached to it. You read a short text, answer, and never see it again. There is no long article with a run of questions hanging off it, and no reward for a second look.
That format has a consequence worth knowing: the whole answer is in the passage in front of you, and a question you cannot answer is a passage you have misread, not a fact you failed to learn. Passages come from literature, history and social studies, the humanities and science, and some carry a small table or graph.
Information and Ideas asks what the text says and what follows from it: the central idea, a specific detail, which piece of evidence supports a claim, and — the one that costs most marks — what can be inferred. An inference question on this test has exactly one defensible answer, and the wrong options are almost always true statements that the passage does not actually license.
Command of evidence comes in two forms here. The textual kind gives you a claim and several quotations and asks which supports it. The quantitative kind gives you a table or a graph and asks which statement the data support — where the trap is a sentence that is true of the world but not shown by the figures.
Craft and Structure asks how the text works. Three things recur: a word in context, where the answer is the meaning that fits this sentence rather than the meaning you know best; the structure and purpose of a text or of one sentence inside it; and cross-text connections, where two short passages take positions on the same subject and you are asked how the second would respond to the first.
Ten questions in the shapes above, each with its own embedded passage, written at the PSAT's level rather than the SAT's. Every passage is invented, and every question is answerable from the words printed in it.
Where a question turns on a distinction, the explanation names it — a stated claim against an implied one, a true sentence against a supported one, the common meaning of a word against its meaning here.
