Long-passage questions on highly competitive university entrance exams can be classified into several fixed types. If you have a standard method for each type, you can respond consistently even to an unfamiliar passage.
Basic Rules
① Content-matching questions: The task of comparing the passage with the choices. Incorrect choices are often created in typical ways:
- Reversal of cause and effect (changing “A causes B” to “B causes A”)
- Overgeneralization (changing “some” in the passage to “all” in the choice)
- Adding certainty (changing “〜 may be” in the passage to “〜 is” in the choice)
- Reversing the chronological order
When you see the choices, first find the corresponding part of the passage and check whether any of the changes above have been made.
② Fill-in-the-blank questions: Discourse markers showing the logical relationship before and after the blank (contrast, cause and effect, parallelism, or specification) are often the key to the answer. Rather than considering the exact phrase to put in the blank first, first determine whether the relationship between the preceding and following sentences is sequential or contrasting.
③ Summary and title-selection questions: The choice centered on the keywords or concepts repeated most often throughout the passage is often correct. Conversely, a choice that discusses only part of the passage (a specific example or counterargument) is likely to be incorrect (a typical wrong-answer pattern that makes you mistake a part for the whole).
Passage: “Some studies suggest that moderate exercise may improve sleep quality, though the effect size varies across individuals.”
(Some studies suggest that moderate exercise may improve sleep quality, but the size of the effect varies from person to person.)
Example of an incorrect choice: “Exercise always improves sleep quality for everyone.” ← may has become always, and the limitation “varies across individuals” has disappeared = overgeneralization and added certainty
Points to Note
① Incorrect content-matching choices can be broadly divided into those that state something not written in the passage and those that distort and exaggerate part of the passage. The latter are harder to detect, so pay particular attention to words in the choices that express frequency or degree (always / never / mainly / only / all).
② In fill-in-the-blank questions, it is faster and more accurate to first decide whether the relationship before and after the blank is contrast or sequence, cause or effect, and then choose a suitable word (however/therefore/for example, etc.), rather than considering the meanings of the choices first.
③ In summary questions, an incorrect choice that makes you mistake a part for the whole uses the content of a specific example or subtopic in the passage as the summary. A summary must correspond to the most abstract claim running through the entire passage.
④ In written summary questions, you must fit “the structure of the claim + evidence” within the word limit. This requires editing by removing the details of specific examples and leaving only the abstract claim and its direct reason.
- Incorrect content-matching choices: reversal of cause and effect/overgeneralization/added certainty/reversed chronology
- For fill-in-the-blank questions, first determine the logical relationship before and after the blank (sequence/contrast/cause and effect)
- For summary and title questions, choose the option corresponding to the most abstract claim
- Pay attention to frequency and degree words such as always/never/only to detect incorrect choices
- For written summaries, remove specific examples and leave only the structure of the claim + evidence
Practice
- What wrong-answer pattern is it when “may improve” in the passage is changed to “always improves” in a choice?
- What should you determine first when solving a fill-in-the-blank question? Explain.
- Explain why an incorrect answer that makes you mistake a part for the whole arises in summary questions.