Mastering ACT and SAT Reading General Questions
Students are often confused and intimidated by General Questions. Learn Quiz Hacker's "Bird's Eye Analysis" tactic to reduce stress and increase your score!
Identifying General Questions
General questions are common on the SAT and ACT Reading Tests. I describe them as “general” because, instead of focusing on particular words, phrases, or sentences from the passage, these questions ask about the passage as a whole. For example, they may ask for the main point, main theme, main purpose, primary purpose, central claim, or central problem of the entire passage. Some General Questions ask which answer summarizes the passage or which answer “describes what happens in the passage.”
A Common Myth
There are a lot of false rumors floating around the murky world of test prep. One of those myths is that General Questions are fundamentally different than the other question types you encounter on SAT/ACT Reading. That’s unfortunate because it leads to many lost points.
The biggest mistake people make on General Questions is abandoning the use of standard strategy and tactics. Because these questions ask about the passage as a whole, test takers are often led to believe that True/False Fact-Checking and Hyper-Literal Textual Analysis don’t apply and that they must instead rely on their overall impression of the passage.
However, as with all other SAT & ACT Reading questions, interpretation and intuition have no place on General Questions. As we will see, Fact-Checking and Hyper-Literal Reading very much still apply.
With the preliminaries out of the way, let’s move on to discussing some highly effective tactics for this question type:
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