Function is a job, not a summary
The stem is Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole? A correct answer names what the sentence does for the paragraph. Every wrong answer will also be a true sentence about the passage; that is what makes the item hard.
A function answer has a verb at its centre — concedes, rules out, supplies, introduces, qualifies, reframes, corrects, cautions against. Read the verb first and check it against the underlined sentence alone. If the verb does not fit, nothing after it can save the choice.
Sai lầm phổ biến nhất: đọc câu gạch chân, dịch nó ra tiếng Việt, rồi tìm phương án nào giống bản dịch nhất. Cách đó luôn dẫn tới phương án “mô tả nội dung”, trong khi đề hỏi vai trò. Hai câu có nội dung y hệt nhau vẫn có thể mang hai chức năng khác nhau, tuỳ vào câu đứng trước và câu đứng sau nó. Vì vậy phải đọc hàng xóm của câu gạch chân trước khi đọc chính nó.
Ravens in a laboratory were given a puzzle box that opened only after a stone was dropped into a tube. Most birds solved it within a few sessions. The finding by itself says little about what ravens do in the wild. A behaviour that appears when food is guaranteed and predators are absent may never be worth performing in a forest, and the experiment was not designed to answer that question. Fieldwork took it up separately a decade later.
Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?
- It questions whether the ravens actually solved the puzzle.
- It introduces a competing explanation for the birds' success.
- It concedes a limit on what the experiment just described can show.
- It summarises the fieldwork mentioned in the final sentence.
Look at the neighbours. Before: the experiment worked. After: two reasons why laboratory success need not transfer. The underlined sentence is the hinge that admits a limit and licenses those reasons. (A) misreads it as doubt about the result itself, which the passage never raises. (B) would require a rival account of why the birds succeeded. (D) names material that comes after, and one sentence cannot summarise what has not yet been said. Answer (C).
The two-question routine
1. What is on the table just before the underlined sentence? A standard view, a result, an expectation, an objection.
2. What does the sentence after it do that it could not have done without the underlined one? If the following sentence draws a conclusion, the underlined sentence supplied a premise. If the following sentence explains, the underlined sentence made a claim. If the following sentence reverses, the underlined sentence set up the expectation being reversed.
For a century the standard chronology of the site rested on a single coin found in the upper fill. Coins, however, circulate for decades before they are lost. A coin struck in 320 might enter the ground in 380, so the date it carries fixes only the earliest possible date for the layer above it, not the date of that layer. The excavation's radiocarbon programme eventually put the fill two generations later than the coin had suggested.
Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?
- It introduces the fact that undercuts the chronology described just before it.
- It explains why coins are the most precise dating evidence available.
- It introduces the radiocarbon results reported at the end of the text.
- It questions whether the coin was found where the excavators reported.
Question one: a chronology built on one coin. Question two: the next sentence works out what a coin date can and cannot fix — which it can only do once the circulation point is granted. So the underlined sentence supplies the fact that pulls the old chronology apart. (B) reverses its force. (C) points forward to material the sentence does not touch. (D) attacks the excavators' honesty, which the passage never does. Answer (A).
The distractor that is true about the passage
This is the family of wrong answers that costs the most marks. The statement is accurate — the passage really does contain it — but it belongs to a different sentence.
Heat maps of the city show differences of up to seven degrees between neighbourhoods a kilometre apart. The cool districts are those with mature street trees; the hot ones were paved in the 1960s and never replanted. A tree planted today casts no useful shade for fifteen years. Programmes that promise relief in the next heat wave are therefore promising something trees cannot deliver, whatever else they are worth.
Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?
- It states the evidence linking tree cover to neighbourhood temperature.
- It recommends a planting programme for the hottest districts.
- It explains why the 1960s districts were paved without trees.
- It supplies the fact that the final sentence uses to reject a claim.
(A) is true of the passage — the second sentence does exactly that — but it is not true of the underlined sentence, which says nothing about existing cover. That is the trap. The underlined sentence introduces a time lag, and therefore in the next sentence turns that lag into a refusal. (B) recommends nothing, and (C) explains a history the passage leaves alone. Answer (D).
Phương án đúng về đoạn nhưng sai về câu là bẫy nặng nhất của dạng này, và nó luôn nghe rất thuyết phục vì bạn vừa đọc đúng thông tin đó ở dòng trên. Cách chặn duy nhất: che cả đoạn, chỉ để lộ câu gạch chân, rồi hỏi “một mình câu này có làm được việc mà phương án mô tả không?”.
The verb decides
Two choices can name the same content and differ only in their verb. The verb is then the whole question.
A materials group reported a ceramic that carries current without resistance at an unusually high temperature. Three laboratories tried to reproduce the result and failed. Reproduction failures are not, on their own, a verdict. The original samples were grown by a method that took the group four years to stabilise, and none of the three laboratories had it. What the failures establish is that the published recipe is incomplete.
Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?
- It reports the outcome of the three attempted reproductions.
- It withholds a conclusion the reader might otherwise draw at that point.
- It argues that the original result was fabricated.
- It describes the method used to grow the original samples.
(A) and (D) are both true of the passage and both belong to other sentences. Between the remaining two, the verbs decide: the sentence blocks an inference rather than making an accusation, and the rest of the paragraph goes on to say what the failures do establish. Answer (B).
Hãy tập đọc phương án theo công thức động từ + tân ngữ + vị trí. Ví dụ: “chặn (động từ) một suy luận (tân ngữ) mà câu trước gợi ra (vị trí)”. Ba mảnh đó phải đúng cả ba. Học sinh thường chỉ kiểm mảnh tân ngữ — thấy đúng nội dung là chọn — rồi mất điểm vì động từ sai hoặc vì câu đó nằm ở chỗ khác trong đoạn.
A vocabulary of functions
Set up — states the view, expectation, or standard account the rest will act on.
Concede — grants a point against the author's own position before answering it.
Qualify — keeps a claim but limits its scope or its strength.
Block — rules out an inference the reader is about to make.
Supply — provides a fact the following sentence needs in order to conclude.
Reframe — takes what has just been presented as a defect and treats it as evidence.
Turn — marks the point where the paragraph changes direction.
The novelist's first three books were set in the city she grew up in, and reviewers treated the fourth, set on a research station in Antarctica, as a departure. The change of setting concealed a continuity of subject. Every one of her books turns on a small group of people who cannot get away from one another, and the ice does what the tenement did: it shuts the door.
Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?
- It concedes that the reviewers' assessment was correct.
- It supplies biographical background for the fourth novel.
- It contrasts two groups of the novelist's readers.
- It states the claim that the rest of the text supports.
The sentence after it gives evidence, and evidence needs a claim to serve. (A) inverts the sentence, which contradicts the reviewers rather than agreeing with them. (B) and (C) describe material the passage does not contain at all. Answer (D).
Accounts of the 1889 strike written before the union's papers were catalogued rely almost entirely on the employers' correspondence, which survives in bulk and is easy to read. The union's records were never lost; they were uncatalogued, which for most of a century came to the same thing. Since the boxes were sorted, three books have drawn on them, and all three describe a dispute organised months earlier than the employers had believed.
Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?
- It explains why the employers' correspondence survives in bulk.
- It corrects a likely inference about why one body of evidence went unused.
- It introduces the three books named in the final sentence.
- It criticises the historians who wrote before the boxes were sorted.
A reader told that early accounts used only employer sources will assume the union sources were destroyed. The sentence removes that assumption and puts a duller cause in its place. (D) is the tempting near miss, but the sentence blames an archive, not the historians, and the final sentence credits the books that followed. Answer (B).
The museum has begun printing, beside each object from the expedition, the name of the local guide who identified it. This is not an attempt to redistribute credit for the science. The guides did not design the survey or write it up, and the labels do not say they did. What the labels record is that the specimens were found by people whose knowledge of the ground was the reason the expedition went where it went.
Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?
- It states the museum's reason for mounting the expedition.
- It concedes that the guides designed the survey.
- It rules out a misreading of the practice just described.
- It compares two ways of writing museum labels.
The two sentences that follow spell out what the labels do not claim and then what they do claim, which is only necessary if a misreading has been raised and denied. (B) asserts the opposite of the sentence. (A) and (D) name topics the passage never opens. Answer (C).
Bộ động từ ở trên nên học thuộc như học công thức, vì đề chỉ xoay quanh chừng đó vai trò. Khi đọc xong đoạn, hãy tự gọi tên vai trò của câu gạch chân bằng một trong các động từ đó trước khi mở bốn phương án. Làm được vậy thì việc chọn chỉ còn là tìm phương án nào dùng đúng động từ mình đã nghĩ ra — nhanh hơn và an toàn hơn nhiều so với đọc cả bốn phương án rồi cân nhắc.
Đừng chọn phương án chỉ vì nó dùng lại từ ngữ của câu gạch chân. Đề rất hay viết một phương án sai bằng đúng những chữ có trong câu đó, và viết phương án đúng bằng chữ hoàn toàn khác (“rules out”, “withholds”, “supplies”). Trùng chữ là dấu hiệu đáng nghi, không phải dấu hiệu đáng tin.