The blank is a conclusion the text has already forced
The stem never changes: Which choice most logically completes the text? The four choices are all written in the register of the passage and all sound reasonable. Reasonableness is not the test.
Cover the choices. Read the passage and finish the sentence yourself in eight or nine words. Then look for the choice that says your sentence. A student who reads the four options first will find three of them attractive; a student who predicts first usually finds only one.
Đây là dạng khó nhất phần Đọc, và lý do rất cụ thể: bốn phương án đều đúng với thế giới thực, chỉ một cái đúng với đoạn văn này. Bài thi không hỏi bạn nghĩ gì về chủ đề đó. Nó hỏi: đọc xong bốn câu trên, có bắt buộc phải kết luận điều gì không. Cái gì đoạn văn không đưa dữ kiện thì không được điền vào, dù nó đúng ngoài đời.
Two anchors: the set-up and the complication
Almost every inference passage has the same skeleton. Sentences one and two establish something. Then a sentence pushes against it — a new observation, a control condition, an exception. The blank is the resolution, and it must use both anchors.
Set-up — một quan niệm, một quy luật, một quan sát ban đầu.
Complication — dữ kiện đẩy ngược lại: nhóm đối chứng, ngoại lệ, con số bất ngờ.
Blank — kết luận duy nhất còn đứng vững khi có cả hai.
Cuneiform tablets recording grain loans normally name both parties and a repayment date, and they carry the seal impressions that made an agreement enforceable before a court. A cache of tablets recently catalogued from a single household names only the borrower, gives no date, and bears no seal at all. The cataloguers concluded that these particular tablets
Which choice most logically completes the text?
- were forgeries produced in order to defraud lenders.
- record loans that were never repaid.
- served as private records rather than as enforceable agreements.
- were written by a scribe who had not finished his training.
The set-up lists the three features an enforceable loan tablet has; the complication is that this cache has none of them. What follows is only that the documents were not built to be enforced. (A) invents an intent the text never mentions. (B) is about repayment, which nothing in the passage measures. (D) explains the difference by inventing a scribe. Answer (C).
Phương án hay chết người nhất là phương án giải thích nguyên nhân. Đoạn văn cho thấy một khác biệt; phương án đưa ra lý do vì sao có khác biệt đó. Nghe cực kỳ thuyết phục, nhưng đoạn văn chỉ chứng minh có khác biệt, không chứng minh vì sao. Không có dữ kiện về nguyên nhân thì không được chọn nguyên nhân.
Four ways a completion fails
1. Nói lại. Chép lại một câu đã có trong đoạn thay vì rút ra điều mới.
2. Vượt quá. Thêm only, never, all, most, proves, will — đoạn văn không đủ sức đỡ.
3. Kiến thức ngoài. Đúng ngoài đời, không có trong đoạn văn.
4. Ngược chiều. Đúng chủ đề, đúng giọng, sai hướng.
In a controlled trial, one group of volunteers took a twenty-minute nap after learning a list of words while a second group stayed awake; the next morning the nappers recalled more words. The same team ran the procedure again with a motor skill in place of the word list and found no difference between the groups. The results suggest that the memory benefit of a short nap
Which choice most logically completes the text?
- depends on the kind of material that was learned.
- disappears entirely within twenty-four hours.
- is larger than the benefit of a full night of sleep.
- makes a nap a necessary part of any study routine.
Two conditions, two different outcomes: the benefit appeared for words and vanished for a motor skill. (B) invents a time course nobody measured. (C) needs a comparison the trial never ran. (D) turns an observed effect into a prescription — the classic over-reach. Answer (A).
Urban foxes in a long-running survey were bolder around people than rural foxes: they let observers come closer and gave up food less readily. Cubs born to urban parents but raised from birth in a rural enclosure behaved like rural foxes on both measures. The survey therefore indicates that the boldness of urban foxes
Which choice most logically completes the text?
- means urban foxes let observers come closer than rural foxes do.
- makes them more likely to survive in cities.
- is shared by every animal that lives near people.
- is shaped by where they grow up rather than by what they inherit.
(A) is the restatement trap: every word of it is true and it is simply sentence one again, so it concludes nothing. (B) adds a survival claim the survey never tested. (C) generalises from one species to all. The cross-fostering result is the whole point, and only (D) uses it. Answer (D).
Phương án “nói lại” rất khó loại vì nó không sai chỗ nào. Mẹo kiểm: che phương án đó đi, hỏi câu này có nằm sẵn trong đoạn văn không. Nếu có, nó không phải kết luận — kết luận phải là điều đoạn văn chưa nói thành lời nhưng đã buộc phải đúng.
Guaranteed, not merely likely
Rank the four choices by how much extra the world has to cooperate for them to be true. The answer is almost always the one that needs the least.
An analysis of nineteenth-century sheet-music catalogues found that songs reaching more than five printings were almost always written for solo voice and piano, while songs for larger ensembles rarely went past a second printing even when reviewers praised them warmly. Since most purchasers owned a piano but had no ensemble at hand, the difference in printings most likely reflects
Which choice most logically completes the text?
- the quality of the music rather than its popularity.
- what buyers could actually perform at home rather than what critics admired.
- the higher cost of printing scores for many instruments.
- a decline in the popularity of ensemble music after 1850.
(C) is true of printing in general and would explain the pattern nicely — but the passage supplies no cost figures, so it needs outside help. (A) contradicts the sentence about warm reviews. (D) invents a trend. The passage hands you the buyers and their pianos; (B) uses exactly that. Answer (B).
Two forest plots were compared for how quickly fallen logs decayed. Plot A, with a dense understorey that held moisture through the summer, lost its logs in about eleven years; plot B, open to sun and wind, took twenty-six. The two plots share the same tree species, the same soil type and the same fungal community, so the difference in decay rate is most likely due to
Which choice most logically completes the text?
- differences in the species of wood available.
- the larger number of insects in plot B.
- how long the logs stayed damp.
- the age of the trees at the time they fell.
The last sentence deliberately removes three candidate explanations, which kills (A) directly and leaves (D) with no support. (B) introduces insects, a variable the passage never mentions. The one difference the passage does name is moisture. Answer (C).
Câu “the two plots share the same X, Y, Z” không phải là câu trang trí. Bất cứ khi nào đoạn văn liệt kê những thứ giống nhau, nó đang đóng cửa loại trừ — và mỗi thứ được liệt kê thường là một phương án nhiễu chờ sẵn. Đọc tới câu đó thì gạch luôn ba phương án tương ứng.
Blanks in the middle, and blanks in conditionals
Some blanks sit inside a sentence that continues after them. The words after the blank constrain the answer just as tightly as the words before it.
Museums have long assumed that the visitors who linger longest at an object are the ones most engaged with it. Eye-tracking data from a recent gallery study complicate that assumption: the visitors who stood longest in front of a painting were frequently looking past it, at the room, at other visitors, at their phones. If dwell time and attention can come apart in this way, then and galleries designed around it may be optimising for the wrong thing.
Which choice most logically completes the text?
- dwell time is a poor proxy for engagement
- visitors should be discouraged from bringing phones into galleries
- eye-tracking is the only reliable measure of engagement
- most museum visitors are not interested in the art they came to see
Whatever fills the blank must be the thing that “galleries designed around it” refers to, so the answer has to be a claim about dwell time. That alone removes (B) and (D). (C) fails on only — the study shows one measure is unreliable, not that another is uniquely reliable. Answer (A).
Every manuscript in the Vernot collection that bears a watermark was produced at the Ollen mill, and the Ollen mill did not begin operating until 1478. A newly examined Vernot manuscript carries a colophon dated 1461, written in the same hand as the main text. If that date is accurate, it follows that this manuscript
Which choice most logically completes the text?
- was produced at the Ollen mill.
- is the oldest manuscript in the collection.
- has a colophon written by a later hand.
- bears no watermark.
Run the chain: watermark $\rightarrow$ Ollen $\rightarrow$ after 1478. The manuscript is dated 1461, so it cannot have come from Ollen, so it cannot bear a watermark. (A) reverses the chain. (C) denies the condition the stem told you to accept. (B) needs the dates of every other manuscript. Answer (D).
Với chỗ trống kiểu it follows that, đừng đoán theo cảm giác — viết chuỗi suy luận ra bên lề: có watermark $\rightarrow$ xưởng Ollen $\rightarrow$ sau 1478. Bản này ghi 1461, tức là không thể ở nhánh cuối, nên phải phủ định nhánh đầu. Đây là phép phản đảo, và đề thật dùng nó thường xuyên hơn học sinh tưởng.