The Little Blue Reasoning Book - Brandon Royal [76]
APPENDIX V – CRITICAL READING AND COMPREHENSION
For an in-depth review of the strategies used to answer reading comprehension questions, including coverage of The Four-Corner Question Cracker for Reading Comprehension™, refer to Appendix VI – Tips for Taking Reading Tests.
Problem 43: Sample Passage
Back to problem
Question 1
Choice D. This is an overview question. Look for the words of the topic and avoid overly detailed or overly general answer choices.
Choice A is too general because a discussion of educational philosophy in the last forty years would likely incorporate the viewpoints of many individuals, not just the author’s viewpoint. Choice B is outside the passage’s scope. We do not necessarily know whether or not teachers should receive more liberal arts training. Choice C is a correct statement within the passage’s context. However, it is too detailed to satisfy the primary purpose as demanded by this overview question.
For an overview question, there are effectively five reasons why wrong answers could be wrong. An answer choice will either be outside a passage’s scope, opposite in meaning, distorted in meaning, too general, or too detailed. Whereas choice C was too detailed, choice A is an overly general answer choice. It is very useful to be on the lookout for “out of the scope”-type answers. This was the fate of answer choices B and E. Note that opposites or distortions are not common wrong answer choices with regard to overview questions.
A time-honored tip for answering overview questions involves performing a “topic-scope-purpose” drill. That is, we seek to identify the passage’s topic, scope, and purpose. Topic is defined as the passage’s broad subject matter. It’s an “article on education.” The topic is therefore “education.” Scope is defined as the specific aspect of the topic that the author is interested in. The scope here is “schooling versus education.” Last, purpose is defined as the reason the author sat down to write the article. His purpose is to say: “Colleges or universities can’t educate; they exist to prepare students for later learning because youth itself makes real education impossible.”
Knowing the topic, scope, and purpose is enough to answer directly the question at hand. And knowing the author’s purpose will likely set us up for another right answer on at least one of the remaining questions. Identifying the topic alone can help get us halfway to a right answer because the correct answer to an overview question almost always contains the words of the topic. In this case, the word “education” (or its derivative “educated”) does not appear in answer choices B or E. We can feel fairly confident eliminating both of these choices.
Question 2
Choice E. This is an explicit-detail question which enables the reader to go back into the passage and effectively underline the correct answer. Look for a very literal answer.
Where is the correct answer to be found? Consider the words “prepare the young for continued learning in later life by giving them the skills of learning” (1st paragraph) and “better off if their schooling had given them the intellectual discipline and skill” (3rd paragraph). The word “skill” surfaces both times that the author talks about what schools should be doing.
Choice A is outside the passage’s scope. The passage does not talk about improving academic instruction or have anything to do with grassroots education levels. Nor does the passage talk about adults’ opinions. Choice B is essentially opposite in meaning. To be correct, the answer choice should read, “redefine ‘education’ as ‘schooling’ so to better convey to parents the goals of teaching.” The author feels that adults have missed the point in thinking that finishing school