multiple choice strategies

Whatever you do, DON’T look at the possible answers.

Whatever you do, DON’T leave a question blank.

This is a “high stakes” reading test Don’t skim. Don’t look at the questions first. Don’t blindly guess (unless it's a time thing.)

Count on Variety: fiction, nonfiction  letter  speech  essay  play  Science journals  Novel excerpts  “primary source documents”  poetry

Count on diversity  age  difficulty  ideas  genre

There are not 54 questions on the test. There are just a few types of questions:  inference  purpose  context  tone  rhetorical term

inference high volume question “intelligence”

purpose questions function  Why is this here?  What should go here?  evidence  audience  structure

context questions high volume question The answers to context questions are often “8 lines” above or “8 lines” below. The answer to a context question is rarely the “common” definition.

rhetorical term questions The correct answer is never the weird rhetorical term.  anaphora  chiasmus  paraprosdokian

There might not be a right answer. There might be a best answer. (key)

They want you to feel stupid. You can’t know every word.  context  etymology Words come from somewhere.

a pattern to consider The test usually begins by asking a question(s) about the whole passage and then moves through the passage in a linear pattern. And so therefore...

exam vocabulary question stem key distracters 2013 Corvette

a Corvette can have characteristics long weird word recapitulation of a words or phrases from the passage fact half right