GED and HiSET language arts — informational and workplace texts

Both tests put a reading section in front of you, and most of what they give you to read is not a story. It is a memo from a manager, a letter about rent, a notice from a clinic, a job posting, a page of instructions. The questions that follow are not about whether you enjoyed it. They are about whether you can say what the text is doing.

This set is twelve of those, one short passage each, every passage written for this exercise. They are deliberately adult: a lunch-break policy, a twenty-dollar balance still owed, a warehouse job paying eighteen dollars an hour, a child-care room on class nights. That is the world both exams draw from, because the people sitting them are usually working while they study.

Eight skills are covered. The central idea of a whole text, which is not the same as the first sentence and not the same as the most striking detail. The point of one paragraph inside a longer notice — a question that catches people who answer with the main idea of everything. Which detail actually supports a claim that has been made, as against which detail is merely nearby. Who a text is written for, when several different people are mentioned in it and only one of them is being told to do something. The purpose behind a letter that is polite about something unwelcome. The line between a statement that could be checked and a statement of belief, when both are in the same short paragraph. What a word means in the sentence where you found it, rather than in the dictionary. What a text implies without ever saying it. What two notices that contradict each other actually disagree about. And which sentence is a fair summary rather than one true fragment.

Every question can be answered from its own passage; nothing depends on remembering an earlier question, and there are no charts or images — where a figure matters it is written out in words. The wrong answers are not filler. Most of them are the mistake that is genuinely available: a statement that is true but not the point, an inference that goes one step too far, a purpose that belongs to a different part of the letter.

Zestly is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with GED Testing Service, which owns the GED test, or with the HiSET program, and it is not a test centre. Nothing here reproduces any official test material.

• State the central idea of an informational text, and tell it apart from a true detail inside that text
• Say what one paragraph is doing inside a longer notice, without sliding into the point of the whole thing
• Pick the detail that actually supports a stated claim
• Work out who a text is addressed to when several parties are mentioned in it
• Separate a statement that could be checked from a statement of belief in the same paragraph
• Read a common word in the sense the passage gives it
• Draw the inference a passage supports, and stop before the one it does not
• Say what two conflicting notices actually disagree about, and summarize a passage without mistaking a fragment for the whole

Written for this exercise, in the style of the workplace and public texts both tests use. From the bank: "Notice to all contract drivers: beginning October 1, mileage logs must be submitted through the driver portal rather than on paper. Paper logs turned in after that date will be returned unprocessed, and payment for those trips will be delayed until an electronic log has been filed. Dispatchers will not enter logs on a driver's behalf." The question asks who the notice is written for — the dispatchers are named in it, but the duty and the loss both fall on the driver reading it.