By The SAT reading section can seem daunting — five reading passages to read and 52 multiple choice questions to answer in just over an hour. The reading passages and their corresponding questions can thankfully be broken down into bite-size pieces and categories. There are eight different types of questions you can expect to see on the reading section of the SAT. The question types vary in terms of frequency and test you on different skills, but they all have one thing in common: they can all be cracked.
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of breaking down the question types one by one, we need to talk about one important thing. On the SAT – or on any standardized test for that matter – there will only ever be one totally and completely 100% correct answer choice. Deciphering your answer choices is important, but to even get to that point, you need to understand the type of question you’re looking at.
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By understanding your question type, you understand what exactly is being asked of you and what you need to do to get the right answer. The SAT reading section measures your ability to comprehend complex and differentiated texts under time pressure. Interestingly, doing well on the reading section, more often than not, comes down to who is more familiar with the types of passages and questions, not who is a faster reader.
Think about it.
Student A can read a social studies passage in four minutes, leaving her roughly eight minutes to answer ten questions. But, she’s never seen an Inference or Function question before. Very likely, this student will spend those eight minutes puzzling over phrasing, details, guesswork, and possible answers. In total, a twelve-minute reading section ends up dragging on well over the fifteen-minute mark.
Student B can read that same passage in about six minutes- half the allotted time. Even though this student has less time to answer the ten questions, he has a trick up his sleeve. Student B has done multiple practice exams and has done tutoring with Test Geek (shameless plug). Student B’s familiarity with the eight Question Types lets him look over the overwhelming passage questions and instead see: 3 Big Picture, 2 Detail, 2 Supporting Evidence, 1 Inference, and 2 Vocab-In-Context questions. With that knowledge and the tools to decipher the questions, Student B will stay on track.
Student B knows what we want all of our students to know: the SAT reading section, and the corresponding questions, are not that bad. Not bad at all once you know how to approach it.
Alright, into the thick of it.
1. Big Picture
First up: the most common reading section question out there, the Big Picture question. Big picture questions gauge multiple test-taking skills including reading comprehension, critical thinking, and text synthesis. Sounds dense, right? Luckily, there are some clear signs that you’ve stumbled upon a big picture question.
If the question starts with one of these prompts (or one like it):
- The main idea of the passage is…
- The overarching theme of the story was…
- The main argument of this passage can best be summarized as…
You’ve hit a Big Picture.
Now that you know what you’re looking at, here comes the tricky part. Let’s break down the ‘how’ of answering Big Picture questions correctly. We already know that our question is asking something comprehensive, something that we can’t just find on line 37. What we need to figure out is how to piece together that ‘big picture’ out of the text.
Start by taking a small breather at the end of each passage. Once you’ve read it all the way through, take the next thirty seconds to summarize the passage to yourself. Pretend you’re giving an elevator pitch to a publisher about this passage. What are the main themes? Arguments? Transitions? Is there a shift in tone?
Think about it like this: If I wanted someone to understand what this passage was about in 6 sentences or less, what would I say?
Would I include the color of the seamstress’ shirt? No, that’s a detail. Would I have synonyms for some word the author used? Nope. Save that for the vocab questions.
I would say: This story was a suspense-filled tale about a young girl who moves to a new town. There’s a creepy tone the whole time, especially when talking about this boy in her algebra class. The boy follows her out of class one day, and that’s where there’s a big shift. The boy and girl get to know each other and he reveals his troubled childhood. The story ends with a light-hearted, maybe even coupley, tone and the boy and girl are good friends.
Next, armed with your own ‘big picture’ of the text, go on to the answer choices. Make sure the answer choice you select not only mirrors your own big picture but also includes a wide enough scope.
2. Detail
Up next are our Detail questions. Think of these as the polar opposite of Big Picture questions. With Big Picture we thought of the passage as a whole, now with Detail, we want to bring out our reading microscopes.
Detail questions measure how closely you read the text, but they also test how willing you are to go back into the text and find proof for your potential ‘yes’ answer choice. The secret to ace-ing every single Detail question is in the question itself: if you can’t find evidence of it in the text, it isn’t the right answer.
To know when you need to look back into the text for proof, look for these sure signs of a Detail question:
If the question starts by saying:
- “The narrator indicates that Sam quit the team because…”
- “In the passage, Douglass makes which point about freedom?”
- “The narrator’s musical skills include all of the following except…”
It’s a Detail question.
You might be wondering, what if I don’t remember reading that detail in the passage? What if I had to skim the passage because I take a little longer when I close read? Well, breathe easy because you have nothing to worry about. All you need to remember from reading the passage is generally where that information might be located. This is just to save you from re-reading everything another time to find it.
Once you’ve gotten to the right paragraph in the text, now is when you pull out your microscope. You may have heard growing up that being too picky can be a bad thing. While that might be true day-to-day, there is no such thing as being too picky when it comes to the SAT. Be as picky as possible; we encourage it!
First, take a quick look over your answer choices for the Detail question. Then, go through the part of the passage you’re looking at with a fine-tooth comb. If you can’t prove an answer choice with text evidence – or even worse, if the text disproves an answer choice – I can promise you: that it is not the right answer.
Something to take with you into the test: With Detail questions, you can rest assured you will always find proof for the correct answer. Remember, if it’s not right there in the text, it’s not right. Period.
3. Supporting Evidence
Try to think of the Detail questions and the Supporting Evidence questions as best friends. Where you see one, you’ll most likely see the other.
Generally, the Detail and Supporting Evidence questions follow in the same order as they’ve been listed here. First, you find the correct Detail answer by proving it to yourself in the text. Now comes the really easy part (if you’ve done the first part correctly). Supporting Evidence questions ask you to, unsurprisingly, support the previous question and answer with textual evidence. The structure of the answer choices, if you’re unfamiliar, is a series of text selections from the passage that you have to read through and determine which best supports your answer to the Detail question preceding it.
Unfortunately, I can’t tell you that every single time the text selection you find on your own and the text selection in the Supporting Evidence answer choice will line up perfectly (how nice would that be??)… but if you’re looking in the right area to begin with, they will almost always be right after one another.
You’ll know that you’re on the right track in answering the Supporting Evidence question if:
- The text selection you’re considering is near or is exactly the lines you looked at to prove your own answer.
- The text selection you’re considering proves the Detail question completely right.
- The text selection you’re considering cannot be used to prove any other Detail Q answer choice “right”. Only yours.
4. Vocab in Context
Vocab in Context questions deal less with how difficult a word is and more with the context surrounding a certain word. The words included in these question types are typically ones we use every day: stack, concentration, focus, raise, train, etc. Where the trouble comes in is sifting through the sentence to find the exact context surrounding the vocab word.
If I say the word “stacks” without context, can you tell me what exactly the definition is? What if I’m using the word in a slang context, and I’m referring to money? What if I’m saying there are “stacks” of paperwork on my desk? What if it’s being used as a verb instead of a noun?
What I’m trying to get at is this: these questions will be nearly impossible to answer correctly if you don’t look back at the text and re-read the sentence that the vocab word is included in. The good news is, if you do go back into the text, these questions actually become fairly simple to answer correctly. Here’s the process that we recommend:
First, identify the line(s) that the vocab word appears in. Don’t read through the answer choices before! Trust me. Don’t.
Then, go back to the text and read the selected sentence all the way through, paying special attention to the words/settings/theme surrounding the vocab word.
Next, pretend there’s a blank where the vocab word is. Based on the parts of the sentence that remain, what word would you fill in the blank? How close can you get to the vocab word without just re-stating it?
Finally, and only once you’ve done everything above, go to the answer choices. Sometimes, the very word you chose as your replacement will be one of the answer choices. It’s awesome when that happens, right? I feel like a genius whenever I guess the same word as the SAT, but that’s just me. I guess there’s a reason why I work for Test Geek. But, more often than not, it’ll just be a word really close to your guess that has the same context.
For example:
If our sentence was this: “The difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to the former are by no means slight.”
And our vocab word was slight, what would you replace it with for that sentence? What’s the context? Me, personally, I’d say “small” or “inconsequential”. Something that conveys that the difficulties aren’t to be taken lightly.
If our answer choices are “minor”, “short”, “marginal”, and “tricky”, which one are we going with? If you said marginal, nice! Marginal correctly conveys the context of how the difficulties are not something tiny that can be ignored.
5. Inferences
Inference questions are typically viewed, by my students anyway, as some of the most difficult on the SAT reading section. I think the nerves surrounding Inference questions come from the fact that the questions can be so vague. Unlike Detail questions, Inference questions have no textual evidence. What Inference questions test is not how closely you read the text but how well you understood it.
Inference questions usually look something like this:
- “The author implies that his work ethic in adulthood stemmed from…”
- “It can be reasonably inferred that Mr. Gonzalez is retiring because…”
If you notice, the word “infer” is used in both of the examples I gave you. More often than not, Inference questions will literally have the word “infer” in them. That’s convenient, right? It’s kind of like a spotlight.
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To answer Inference questions correctly, you first have to understand the “Logical implications” of what you read and the question being asked. “Logical implications” is a jargon-y way of saying “what is actually plausible based on the information given to me in the text?” If I know Jess loves playing basketball, and I know Jess’ backyard has a basketball hoop, the logical implication is that Jess uses the hoop in the backyard to practice. Because inference is something we have to do ourselves, we want to use as many text clues as possible to make sure we’re on the right track.
If we know that Sam is the tallest kid in his class, and we know that Sam is 5 feet tall, what else do we know even though it hasn’t been said?
We know everyone else is under 5 feet tall.
It seems pretty obvious laid out like that, right? But it really is that simple, you just have to get the hang of looking at passages like unfinished equations. If I know A=B and I know B=C, what else do I know? I know A=C. The key to these questions is practice, practice, practice.
6. Connections
Connection questions ask us to draw a line between two pieces of information in the passage and see how they relate. Does author 1 agree or disagree with author 2? How would David’s father react to his maritime adventures in adulthood? Similar to Inference, Connection questions will never have their answer explicitly stated, but they can be correctly answered based on context and reading comprehension.
One of the simplest ways of approaching Connection questions is to treat them like two mini Big Picture questions. Sounds weird but stay with me…
Let’s take this question: “What would the author of Passage 1 most likely think about the hypothesis mentioned on line 72?”
Ok, right away we can see that this is a connection question. We want to know how the author of Passage 1 would feel about the information presented (we can assume) in Passage 2; in other words, we want to connect the main ideas from Passage 1 to the main ideas from Passage 2. What I mean when I say “treat it like two mini Big Picture questions” is that you have to summarize each passage’s main theme individually before you can synthesize the two together.
Looking back at the example question “What would the author of Passage 1 most likely think about the hypothesis mentioned on line 72?”…
If I were approaching this question, I would first summarize the argument or opinion of author 1 on its own. Then, I would do the same for author 2. Finally, I would read the hypothesis on line 72 through the lens of author 1’s opinion. This approach helps us to separate our text-based answers from what our own opinions or reactions to the hypothesis may be.
Something to look out for… the SAT will usually put a certain type of answer choice on Connection questions: what they think that you’ll think about that line in the text. Be very careful to not fall into the trap of answering with your own opinion. Make sure you always answer from what is actually in the text.
7. Functions
Function questions, like Supporting Evidence questions, tell you what you should look for in their title. Is a selection of lines providing character background? Is it offering a definition of a term? Is it highlighting the tension between two opposing sides?
All of these questions essentially ask test takers the same thing: what is the function of the selected text from the passage?
You’ll often see Function questions that look like these examples:
- “The description of the patient in line 27 primarily serves to…”
- “The purpose of the questions in lines 7-9 is…”
- “The author of the passage uses rhetorical questions as a way to…”
When faced with a Function question, your path forward is fairly simple. Put plainly, you just work backward. Because you’re trying to determine what the function of a section of text is, pretend that section got removed. You can cover it, cross it out, or just read around it but the question you ask yourself should always be…
What’s missing from the passage?
If a section of text is in an SAT reading passage, we can assume it’s necessary information. Since that’s the case, whenever we remove text, we’ll end up missing something. Your final step is to figure out what exactly that is. Is it the character’s background? Definitions? Dialogue?
Whatever is missing, summarize the function of that text selection in your own words, then move to your answer choices.
8. Data
Data questions are both the least frequently tested and the most straightforward questions you’ll see on the SAT reading section. You typically only see Data questions come up on the science reading passages and sometimes social science reading passages.
In other words – the two passage types that might include graphs, data tables, and charts.
Interpreting data tables, charts, and graphs correctly takes two things: reading the question carefully and analyzing the information even more carefully. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve walked students through Data questions where they get a 100%, only to miss similar Data questions during time trial situations.
With Data questions, what the SAT is checking to see is if you’ll let the time pressure make your eyes skip over specific data points or if you take the extra 5 seconds to double-check your analysis before answering. Those extra seconds are, literally, the difference between missing some Data questions and ace-ing every single one.
The best advice I can give you with these seemingly “gimmie” questions is to check. your. work. Every single time. No matter how sure you are that you read it right the first time. Worst case scenario, you were right and you spent an extra handful of seconds on a question. Best case scenario, over the course of the SAT reading section, you gain around 100 points back just from checking your work.
Conclusion
The SAT Reading section won’t be easy, in fact, it’s designed to be difficult. Each question type is testing you on a different reading skill, so you cannot approach each question the same way. Familiarizing yourself with the 8 question types is incredibly advantageous to finding answers faster, and understanding questions more clearly.
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