The Three Question Types

What the section actually tests

The exam has two kinds of passage: reading passages (analyse someone else's prose) and writing passages (revise a draft). Within them, three question types recur.

• Comprehension — what does this sentence or paragraph say? Least common. Go back and reread; do not answer from memory.
• Function — what does this sentence do for the argument? The most common type. The reliable move: ask what would be lost if the sentence were deleted.
• Revision — which sentence best achieves a stated goal? The stated goal governs everything. An answer can be true, elegant, and wrong because it does not serve the goal named in the question.

How wrong answers are built

Distractors are rarely false. They are usually true about the passage but wrong about the question:

• true statement, wrong function;
• right function, wrong sentence;
• too broad — describes the whole passage, not this line;
• too narrow — describes a detail, not the move;
• plausible outside the passage but unsupported inside it.

This is why "is this statement true?" is the wrong elimination question. The right one is "does the passage do this, here, for this reason?"