Quizzes, exams, and flashcards about Information and Ideas: Ideas 1 — evidence, data and what follows.
← SAT
Central ideas and details, command of evidence, and inferences — ≈26% of the Reading and Writing section, 12 to 14 questions.
This is the comprehension domain: locating, interpreting, evaluating and integrating information from a text and, sometimes, from a table or graph beside it. Three question types, and they fail in different ways.
Central ideas and details. What is the main idea of this passage, or what does it actually state about X? The trap is a choice that is true of the world and not stated in the text, or true of one sentence and not of the passage.
Command of evidence, textual. You are given a claim, a hypothesis or an argument, and asked which quotation or finding would most strongly support or weaken it. The question is not "which of these is true" but "which of these does work on this specific claim" — a perfectly sound statement that is irrelevant to the claim is wrong.
Command of evidence, quantitative. The same question with a table, graph or chart in place of the quotation. You have to read the data correctly AND decide what it does to the claim. Most wrong answers here misread neither: they read the data correctly and then make a claim the data does not license.
Inferences. The passage stops and you complete it — which choice most logically follows from what has been said? "Most logically" is doing the work: the answer is the one the text forces, not the one that would be interesting or that you happen to believe.
Between what the text says, what the text implies, and what is simply true. Only the first two can ever be the answer, and a wrong option is usually the third: a reasonable, well-informed statement that the passage gives you no grounds for.
This is why background knowledge is a liability here as often as an asset. If you know something about the topic, you will find a choice that agrees with what you know and it will feel right. The only evidence that counts is the twenty-five to a hundred and fifty words in front of you.
Each question has its own passage, 25 to 150 words, and one question attached to it. You never return to a passage. The texts are drawn from literature, history and social studies, the humanities and science — but no question requires you to have read the work or studied the field.
