SAT Reading: Information and Ideas, Craft and Structure
These two domains are about 15 of the 27 questions in every Reading and Writing module. They are the reading half of the section: a short passage, one question, four choices, and no outside knowledge needed. Everything you need to defend an answer is in the text in front of you.
How to work a reading question
Read the question first. These passages are short enough that knowing what you are looking for before you start reading costs nothing and saves a second pass.
Then answer in your own words before you look at the choices. The four choices are written to be tempting in four different ways, and a rough answer of your own is the cheapest protection against all of them.
Why the wrong answers are wrong
Almost every wrong choice on a reading question falls into one of four shapes: too broad for what the passage claims, too narrow to be the main point, true of the world but never mentioned in the passage, or an accurate statement about the wrong part of the passage.
Naming the shape is worth more than eliminating by feel, because the name transfers to the next question. If you cannot say why a choice is wrong, you have not ruled it out yet.
Craft and structure
About 8 of the 27 questions in each Reading and Writing module
How the writer said it, and what the words are doing.
- Words in context
- A blank in a short passage and four words that all fit the grammar; only one fits the argument.
- Text structure and purpose
- What a sentence is doing for the passage - setting up, qualifying, giving an example - rather than what it says.
- Cross-text connections
- Two short texts on one subject, and a question about how the second author would answer the first.
Information and ideas
About 7 of the 27 questions in each Reading and Writing module
What the passage actually claims, and what backs it up.
- Central ideas and details
- The main idea, stated plainly, without the passage's own examples standing in for it.
- Command of evidence (textual)
- Which finding or quotation would most strengthen or weaken the claim being made.
- Command of evidence (quantitative)
- A table or graph beside the passage, and a sentence to complete using the data correctly.
- Inferences
- The sentence the passage has set up but not written - the logical next step, not a guess.
What helps
For a data question, read the headings first
Most wrong choices on a table question describe the table accurately and then say something the passage never claimed - or read the right number off the wrong row.
On paired texts, find the disagreement
Two texts are given to you because they differ. Say in one sentence what the second author would object to before you read the choices.
Words in context is about the sentence, not the dictionary
All four words usually mean something close to the right idea. The one that works is the one the rest of the sentence has already committed to.
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