SAT — Information and Ideas: evidence, data and inference

Thirteen questions covering all four skill points of the domain, and every one of them turns on the same distinction: what the text says, what the text implies, and what merely happens to be true. Only the first two can be the answer. The third is where most wrong options live.

Four on central ideas and details. What is the main idea, or what does the writer actually state about a named thing? The wrong choices here are of two kinds, and both are worth recognizing on sight: something true of the world but never stated in these words, and something true of one sentence but not of the whole. A passage about the printing press notes that early books were expensive; a choice that says the press immediately made books accessible to every class is exactly the claim the passage opens by rejecting, and a choice that names the clergy as its inventors states something the passage never says.

Three on command of evidence in prose. You are given a hypothesis — that fifteenth-century trade was driven by luxury goods rather than conquest, that arctic bird migration is governed by temperature — and asked which finding would most strongly support or most strongly weaken it. The question is never "which of these is true". It is "which of these does work on this claim", and the wrong options are usually findings that are perfectly plausible and simply irrelevant to the specific mechanism proposed.

Note the ones that say weaken. A question can ask you to break a hypothesis rather than prop it up, and reading the stem too fast is the commonest way to lose a question you fully understood.

Three on data. Two of the data questions show their results as a bar graph, as the real section does; the others describe each table in the question in full — every variable, every unit, every value. Read the units before you read any option; that habit alone accounts for a good share of the points here. The wrong answers read the figures perfectly correctly and then fail to do the work the claim needs: they cite one group, or one pair of values, when the claim is about two groups taken together.

Three inferences. A passage stops and you finish it. "Most logically completes" is a logical constraint, not a stylistic one: the right ending is the one the passage's own reasoning forces, and the wrong ones will read perfectly well. A passage describing a feedback loop in which warming causes thawing which causes more warming has already told you the shape of the answer — the process accelerates. What you happen to know about the topic is not evidence, and if you know a lot it is a liability, because there will be a choice that agrees with what you know and is not supported by anything on the page.

The habit that ties all four together: put your finger on it. For a detail or a main-idea question, the answer can be pointed at in the passage. If you cannot point at it, you have chosen the plausible one.

• Tell what a text states from what it implies, and both from what is merely true
• Identify a main idea that holds for a whole passage rather than for one of its sentences
• Judge whether a finding does work on a specific claim, instead of whether it is plausible
• Notice when a question asks you to WEAKEN rather than support a hypothesis
• Read units and variable names off a described data set before evaluating any option
• Refuse a conclusion the data does not license, even when the data has been read correctly
• Complete a passage with the ending its own reasoning forces, not the one that reads best
• Set aside what you already know about a topic when only the words on the page count

Written for this catalog, with no source document. The content is all four skills of the domain (central ideas and details, textual and quantitative command of evidence, inferences), as described publicly by the College Board for the Information and Ideas domain of the SAT Reading and Writing section; every passage, question, option and explanation here is original, and nothing is reproduced from any official publication or released test. Zestly is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with the College Board, which owns the SAT.