Inference questions tend to be among the most challenging types of Reading Comprehension questions on the SAT. Instead of testing your understanding of what is in the text, inference questions test your understanding of what isn’t in the text.
Correct answers to these questions are, however, directly implied by what the author states explicitly. If you think logically and carefully, there is no reason for this type of question to be prohibitively difficult.
Imagine that you read an ad that says, “Unlike our competitor’s yogurt, ours is organic.” The implied meaning is obviously that “our competitor’s yogurt is not organic.” This little mental “flip” is an essential skill for SAT inference questions.
For example, consider this extremely brief passage: All terrichnoderms are classified by biologists as members of the phylum Aeridae. As opposed to members of the phylum Aeridae, phractopods do not have tails that can be used for balance, stability, and navigation.
That’s all the information you get. Below is an example of a question that can be answered with only the two facts above, and no outside information.
Which of the following can be inferred from the passage?
A. Because geckos have tails that can be used for balance, stability, and navigation, they are members of the phylum Aeridae
B. Because phractopods do not have tails, their balance and navigation abilities are less developed than those of animals in the phylum Aeridae
C. Terrichnoderms were not always classified by biologists as members of the phylum Aeridae
D. Terrichnoderms have tails that can be employed for stabilizing and balancing
Whoa, that’s kind of hard! Do not make wild guesses. Instead, go back and organize the information in this passage. You can use “T” for terrichnoderms, “A” for Aeridae, and “P” for phractopods.
You are first told “All T are A.” Easy.
Then, you are told, “As opposed to A, P do not have tails that can be used for balance, stability, and navigation.” So, when the passage says, “As opposed to A, P do NOT have these kinds of tails,” it means that members of A DO have these kinds of tails.
The passage is deliberately feeding you a particular conclusion - a conclusion that must be true based on the information in the passage. Next, go through the answers one by one:
A. You do know that “A” have tails that can be used for balance, stability, and navigation, but you do N O T know that anything that has such a tail is therefore “A”. (For instance, all mammals have bones, but not everything with bones is a mammal). Incorrect.
B. You don’t know this! All you are told is that “phractopods do not have tails that can be used for balance, stability, and navigation.” Maybe they DO have tails (the tails just can’t be used for balance, stability, and navigation). And, of course, they might have other, perfectly good body parts (other than tails) that they can use for balance and navigation. You can’t infer things you just weren’t told. Incorrect.
C. You have absolutely no information about the history of biologists’ classifications of anything. Perhaps you could argue that many thousands of years ago, there were no biologists, and thus biologists could not have classified T as A, but that idea is just not based on the passage. Incorrect.
D. You wrote at the bottom of your diagram that, “A have tails that can be used for balance, stability, and navigation.” Answer choice D is about T, though, not A. But wait a minute! Your diagram says, “All T are A”! If all T are A, and A have these special tails, then T have these special tails! (This is like the transitive property in math!) This answer is a direct match with the information in the passage. Correct.
FYI: There’s no such thing as a terrichnoderm, a phractopod, or a phylum called Aeridae. It is all made up in order to show you that you can succeed simply by organizing the information you were given. Just to be clear, the SAT does not make up information - the makers of the exam pull the information from published sources. Here, I was just making a point.
An inference sticks pretty closely to the facts. To infer for SAT purposes is to use only the information in the passage in order to draw a conclusion that cannot be wrong.
That is, drawing an inference is NOT the same as making an assumption about something that a normal person would assume is probably true. Making assumptions will get you a wrong answer! Picking something that is probably true will also get you a wrong answer!
So, what kind of conclusion could you possibly draw from an SAT passage, using only the information in the passage and not assuming anything? A really boring, trivial, not very insightful one. Seriously.
For instance, if a teacher tells you “Joey failed the test.” What can you infer? That Joey didn’t study? No, maybe he did study and still failed. That the test was hard? Not necessarily. The only thing you can infer is that Joey did not pass the test.
That’s kind of stupid, isn’t it? But it certainly isn’t wrong. Try to argue with “Joey did not pass the test.” You can’t. That’s why it’s an inference.
By the way, not every inference question uses the word infer. Many questions use words such as suggest or imply. For purposes of the SAT, treat all these questions the same way: pick an answer choice that has to be true based on the relevant information from the passage.
Once you get the hang of drawing inferences, you can do it very quickly and easily. For instance, what can you infer from this sentence? In 2008, Ecuador became the first nation in the world to pass a Constitution codifying the rights of nature.
The inference is essentially this: Prior to 2008, no nation had passed a Constitution codifying the rights of nature. You could even infer something like this: As of 2007, the United States Constitution did not codify the rights of nature. That’s kind of random, but definitely true based only on the information presented.
Here’s another Example: Because of monumental shifts in the social behavior the researcher studied in the 1970s, the researcher’s methodology has proved to be of more lasting value than her results.
It might be helpful to paraphrase the original information first. Maybe something like, Since a lot has changed since the ‘70s, the researchers methodology is still valuable, but the results are less valuable. The inference is something like, “The results are out of date.”
Important: Make sure that you pay close attention to negatively phrased answer choices or answers that contain double negatives (e.g., not impossible = possible). Unless you carefully work out what this type of wording actually means, it can very easy confused you.
This tip is important because one of the easiest ways to create a valid inference is to rewrite the original statement from a different angle. For example, if a passage states that a star is much older than the Earth, a valid inference is that the star is not younger than the Earth.
Lastly, as with all reading questions, it is vital to predict an answer before you look at the answer options to avoid getting confused. This particularly important for inference questions.
The SAT Reading Test is tough for a lot of students, and embodies a central complaint many people have about this test: How can you pick just one right answer to a question about a passage?
Reading comprehension is question driven. To be successful, you need to be an active reader – quickly consuming a passage’s main ideas and then saving time to locate relevant information within the passage to answer detail-oriented test questions.
The single most important strategy to get the ACT Reading questions correct is to plagirize the answers from the passages itself
If there is one question you are certain to see on the ACT, it is about the main idea of a passage. The main idea is nothing but the primary purpose of the passage.
Literal translation questions ask about the details of a passage. In contrast to your approach to general questions, to master literal translation problems, you will need to re-read and grasp details in the passage.
Vocabulary-in-context questions are usually among the most straightforward questions on the Reading Test, as well as some of the least time-consuming.
Inference questions tend to be among the most challenging types of Reading Comprehension questions on the SAT. Instead of testing your understanding of what is in the text, inference questions test your understanding of what isn’t in the text.
The SAT test writers are amazingly skilled at writing tempting wrong answers, so it’s worth taking some time to understand the techniques they use to avoid falling for their traps.