Chapter 10
Test-Taking Strategies for Core Reading
IN THIS CHAPTER
Approaching test passages in the most efficient manner
Discovering how to “question the answers”
Addressing the concern of running out of time
Chapter 9 covers the structure of the Praxis reading test and the types of questions you can expect to see. But that chapter is principally an overview of the types of reading skills you’ll want to hone before the exam. In this chapter, we take more of a “game theory” approach to the task at hand, helping you to crack the code of the test and earn a great score by any down-and-dirty means necessary (aside from cheating, of course).
Figuring Out Which to Read First: The Passage or the Question
The same question seems to arise first whenever the subject of answering questions about reading passages comes up: Should you read the passage first and then look at the question(s), or should you scan the question(s) first and then look back for the answers in the passage?
The majority of students who struggle with reading comprehension find that it’s best to start by reading the passage.
So why is it better to read the passage first? Wouldn’t a more commonsense approach be to glance at the question beforehand so you know what you’re supposed to be looking for? That thinking is understandable, but the question-first method is less desirable for a few reasons.
On most reading tests, there are multiple questions about a single passage, so if you start with the questions and then look back, you end up reading certain bits and pieces of the passage over and over instead of reading the whole thing only once. Reading the passage once saves time.
Now, granted, the Praxis Reading test has a good number of one-to-one pairings — brief passages about which only one question is asked — and reading the questions first doesn’t cause as many problems in these instances. However, because you encounter a variety of reading passages on the Praxis — long passages, short passages, one-to-one pairings — you don’t want to continually change your strategy based on the type of question that pops up on the screen. Getting into the habit of reading the question first only on the brief passages means you have to switch up your strategy when a long passage with multiple questions appears. You run the risk of getting thrown off your game. (Whatever your method is, practicing it and sticking to it is always a good idea.)
When you look at the question before reading the passage, having the question on your mind while reading has a tendency to get in the way. You’re unable to really consider what the passage is saying because you’re mentally hearing the question over and over and nervously scanning the text for one sentence that explicitly states the answer. But right answers often aren’t found in one particular sentence. Sometimes they involve making an inference based on considering several of the author’s points together; other times, you may be dealing with a “tone” or “purpose” question that requires you to take a step back and consider the passage as a whole.
As a general rule, focusing on the task before you is always easier when nothing is distracting you. It’s why you can easily walk across a balance beam that’s 1 foot off the ground, whereas walking across the same beam when it’s 50 feet off the ground is terrifying. Having the question running through your head while you’re trying to make sense of the passage is like trying to walk the balance beam while you’re freaking out about how high off the ground it is. Just take the passage on its own terms. If you do that well, when it comes time to look at a question, the answer should be obvious.
What about those questions that ask you what the author means by a specific phrase or give you a specific line number? You’re just wasting time reading the whole passage if the question is only about one measly little line or sentence in it, right? Wrong! One of the most dangerous pitfalls of the question-first method is that it can instill you with a false sense of confidence about where you need to look. Just because the question asks you what the author means in Line 17 doesn’t necessarily mean that the best way to answer the question is to jump straight to Line 17 and read it again and again. Often, the purpose of a given sentence is best clarified by contextual clues found elsewhere in the passage.
Having a good sense of what the passage as a whole means is always an advantage, even if the question ends up asking about only one specific part of the passage. Reading the whole passage before you see the question allows you to process the flow of the text as a whole, rather than as merely a series of statements and details, as you’d see it if you were scanning for one single point.
But the most important reason not to look at the question first is that looking at the question will probably also tempt you to look at the answer choices. And the answer choices were designed to confuse you.
Having the wording of the answer choices in your head while you’re reading the passage is a recipe for disaster. The writers of the test design the wrong answer choices by taking details or groups of words from the passage that are memorable or seem important and then inserting them into answer choices that don’t answer the question. So, having those phrases in your mind while you read causes you to linger over red herrings, possibly ignoring the right answer in the process.
Examining Strategies for the Various Passages
Most people who take the Praxis don’t mind brief statements that are accompanied by one question. Where folks get a little nervous is when they have to read a longer passage (100 to 200 or so words) and then answer a couple of questions about what they just read. Many people aren’t too fond of the paired passages either, where they have to read two passages of about 200 words total and then answer a handful of questions.
In the following sections, I reveal what types of questions usually correspond to each type of passage. Armed with these details, you can face any passage with confidence.
Approaching long and short passages
When a new question first pops up on your computer screen, you can easily tell whether it’s going to be a one-to-one pairing of a brief passage and a single question or a long passage about which there will be several questions. A one-to-one question appears as a centered paragraph with a question below it, whereas a long passage is narrower with the question (which is the first of several) off to the side. Often, the lines in the passage are also numbered so that questions can specifically refer to “Line 5” or “Line 13.” Also, each question has specific directions in bold at the top of the screen. Single passage questions will direct the user to answer the question listed below, while multiple question passages will tell the test-taker how many questions are based on the passage, such as “Questions 5 and 6 refer to the following passage.”
On the long passages, sticking to the method of reading the passage before the questions is doubly important, because repeatedly scanning a long passage for several answers that are only revealed one at a time adds up to a lot of time wasted. But aside from sticking to the system of reading the passage first, what else should you keep in mind while reading the long passage?
A long passage often asks about the meaning or purpose of specific details or sentences, as opposed to asking you about the tone or the purpose of the passage as a whole. Of course, the test might ask you about the overall tone in a long passage, just as it might pair a vocabulary question with a short passage — there aren’t really any rules stipulating that certain types of questions have to be paired with certain passage lengths. But the fact remains that certain types of questions are more commonly found on the long passages.
Questions for long passages often examine the relationship between the passage’s main idea and its supporting points. So when you see a long passage pop up, be prepared for questions along the lines of “The author mentions [some factoid] in order to support the assertion that… .” Long-passage questions tend to be about how the parts form the whole: The questions ask you about the parts, but getting the answers involves comprehending the whole.
Be careful of the trick where a minor detail from the end of a passage is purported to be the “main idea” or “primary purpose” of the passage in an early answer choice. The question writers do that to try and trick you into jumping on that answer merely because it’s fresh in your mind. Remember, something that wasn’t even brought up until the end of the passage is unlikely to be the main idea.
Short passages tend to ask more fact-based questions. When you see a short passage, be prepared to answer questions along the lines of “The passage is primarily concerned with [some factoid]” or “Which of the following is an unstated assumption made by the author of the passage?”
The long and the short passages really aren’t that different. The long passages have more questions about them because, well, they’re longer, so the test-writers have more text to ask questions about. But honestly, that’s about it. Aside from the fact that a long passage is more likely to be argumentative (and therefore lend itself to questions about main and supporting points) whereas a short passage is more likely to be purely informative, you don’t need to approach either one of them in some essentially “different” way. Answering four questions about four paragraphs is more-or-less the same as answering one question about one paragraph four times.
Approaching the paired passages
Some of the passages on the Praxis reading test involve a side-by-side comparison of two passages by two different authors on the same topic. They may explicitly disagree with each other and present two arguments that are mutually exclusive (that is, can’t be true at the same time), or they may just analyze the same issue from two different angles. The questions concentrate on the differences between the two passages. (If this sounds like a pain, keep in mind that you usually see only one passage like this on a given Praxis reading test, although no rule says that there can’t be more than one.)
You know you’re facing a question like this when the first paragraph is designated as “Passage 1” and the second as “Passage 2” (they both pop up on your computer screen at the same time, one above the other). When you have two passages like this before you, expect to see questions about the differences between the two authors’ viewpoints.
Now, the strategy to successfully dealing with paired passages is to avoid going straight from reading the passage to reading the question like you would for other reading questions. Instead, take a few seconds to anticipate the question. Formulating an expectation in your head about what the question may be is actually a good idea, and when it comes to paired passages, it’s a very good idea. After you’ve read the two paired passages, stop for a moment before looking at the question and ask yourself: What is the difference between the two authors’ viewpoints?
Your goal with this approach is to look at two brief, mutually exclusive, thesis-driven paragraphs and explain the difference between them in your own words. You probably wouldn’t have any trouble writing a short sentence that would accurately explain the essence of the two authors’ disagreement. However, when you’re asked to choose from among five prospective explanations written by someone else, discerning the difference between the authors’ points gets tricky.
The solution to this problem is easy: Consider what the difference is in your own words before you look at the question and the answer choices, and then pick the answer choice that presents the nearest paraphrase of what you just said.
Of course, “What is the difference between the two authors’ arguments?” isn’t the only question that the Praxis reading test can ask you about a set of paired passages. A version of this question is almost certain to be one of the questions that follows the paired passages, but there will be others, too (as a type of “long passage,” a paired passage is always followed by multiple questions). Another common question asks something along the lines of “Which of the following devices is used by the author of Passage 1 but not by the author of Passage 2?” The answer choices then present you with five options along the lines of rhetorical questions, similes, flashbacks, pop-culture references, and personification. There’s really no shortcut to answering a question like this: You just have to look back at the passages and see which of the devices is used by the first author but not the second. (Don’t worry — the two passages are brief enough that you can do this without eating up a whole lot of time.)
These questions may also ask the reader to apply the ideas in the texts to other situations, to predict based on what has been read, and to analyze the stylistic structure of a text, such as the difference in the organization of the texts.
The real trick is not getting confused or turned around. When a question asks something like “Which of these devices is used by Author 1 but not Author 2?,” there’s often a wrong answer choice that names a device that is used by Author 2 but not Author 1 to try and trip you up. So, stay sharp and remember what the question asks! (“I got it backwards” is a common head-slapping exclamation on tests like this, so seriously, watch out.)
Approaching Questions about Charts and Graphs
As Chapter 9 explains, the visual- and quantitative-information questions are where the Praxis reading test breaks the mold of most reading-comprehension tests. People simply aren’t used to encountering charts and graphs on a reading test, so these questions can make even very sharp English majors nervous because they seem like something that escaped from a math or science test. But the best way to think about the visual- and quantitative-information questions (of which you’ll see only a few) is to remember that they are, in fact, reading-comprehension questions — you just “read” pictures instead of words. They are still testing for literacy, but it’s a form called visual literacy, which is the ability to make meaning from information and images as opposed to just the written word.
So, the good news about the charts and graphs questions is that they really aren’t any harder than any of the other questions on the Praxis reading test. The bad news is that there’s no trick for answering them correctly. You just have to read the question and then look at the chart or graph to find the answer.
Just because there isn’t a trick, though, doesn’t mean that there isn’t an advantage that can be exploited. There’s actually a big advantage ripe for exploitation on these questions, and that is the fact that they invariably appear toward the very end of the test. The Praxis reading exam usually has about 56 questions, and the visual- and quantitative-information questions usually appear in the late 40s or early 50s. So, if you’re the sort of person who gets nervous around charts and graphs, you’ll at least be in a good position to calculate how much time it’s wise to spend on them.
In short, the best advice about the visual- and quantitative-information questions for people who aren’t comfortable around charts and graphs is to look at the clock, realize how much time you have, and be meticulous in selecting your answer. For example, rather than just reading the question and looking at the graph to see what you think the answer is, take the extra time to plug in the other four answer choices and make sure they’re all wrong. Maybe you made a silly mistake on the first glance that this process will help you catch. (If you don’t, in fact, have a lot of time left when you get to the visual- and quantitative-information questions, see the section “Tips for Slow Readers” at the end of this chapter.)
Eliminating Wrong Answers
When you’re taking the Praxis reading test, remember a piece of advice that was actually the brainchild of a student many years ago: “Don’t answer the questions; question the answers.”
What in the world does that mean? Well, it all comes back to the advice from Chapter 9 about how there are almost always four wrong answers and one right answer, and any answer choice that isn’t wrong must be right. No matter what kind of question you’re looking at, no matter how long or short the passage is, you are always fundamentally dealing with the same situation: You’re given five statements about the passage, and only one of them is 100 percent true. So, look each answer choice straight in the eye and ask it “Are you 100 percent not wrong?” The answer can be “yes” to only one of them.
We can’t stress this enough: You’re not looking for the most interesting statement about the passage, the most detailed one, the one with the biggest words in it, the one that’s the most different from the others, the longest one, or the shortest one. You are looking for the one that has nothing in it that isn’t true. The right answer may be vague, boring, or unremarkable, but that doesn’t matter. All that matters is that everything in it is true.
That’s what questioning the answers means. If you train your test-taking head to examine the answer choices this way, you’ll almost always be able to eliminate at least three of them pretty quickly. If you can eliminate four, well then, problem solved. But sometimes, you may find that the question-the-answers method leaves you with a 50/50 conundrum — two remaining choices that you can’t seem to choose between because they both look plausible.
When that happens, ask yourself: Which of these statements about the passage could be true without the other one also automatically being true? For example, if Choice (B) says “the passage is about an elephant” and Choice (D) says “the passage is about a mammal,” the answer must be Choice (D). Why? Because elephants are mammals, so if Choice (B) is true, then so is Choice D! An animal can be a mammal without also being an elephant, but an animal can’t be an elephant without also being a mammal.
The “Which of these statements can be true by itself?” method won’t solve every 50/50 dilemma, but you’ll be surprised by how many of them it does end up solving. If you do find yourself in a 50/50 bind that you just can’t seem to crack, pick one, even if it’s just a wild guess. Unlike some other standardized tests, you don’t lose points for a wrong answer (as opposed to a blank one) on the Praxis. Because there’s no difference between “blank” and “wrong,” you have no reason not to guess.
If the true-by-itself razor doesn’t help, try looking out for red-flag words such as “always” and “never” (pick the choice that doesn’t have them). If this tip doesn’t apply, then just pick the broader or less detailed of the two answers, on the grounds that an answer choice with less detail in it has a lesser chance of any of the details being wrong.
Tips for Slow Readers
This section deals with the complaint that so many standardized-test takers have, especially about reading-comprehension tests: “I could get all the questions right if I had enough time, but I keep running out of time because I read slowly!”
If you’re worried about running out of time on the Praxis reading test because you’ve had trouble with time management on other standardized tests in the past, keep in mind that time may not be a problem this time around. Although some of the questions on the Praxis can be tricky, most test-takers find it to be one of the more forgiving standardized tests where time is concerned (the time ratio ends up working out to more than 1.5 minutes per question, which almost everyone finds to be more than enough).
If anything, the more likely danger on the Praxis reading test is rushing because you expect to run out of time and making silly mistakes in your haste. Take some sample Praxis exams and time yourself. If you find that time is indeed likely to be a problem for you on this particular test, some of the following tips may help:
- Skip the hard stuff. If you come to a particular sentence or section of a passage that you don’t fully understand, resist the urge to read it over and over. Just keep going. The “hard part” only matters if that’s the part the question ends up being about, and it probably won’t be, so don’t worry about it unless it turns out that you have to after you see the question.
- Eliminate the wrong answers. If you find yourself stuck on a particular question, don’t waste time reading the choices again and again, praying that one will suddenly jump out at you as correct. Get more proactive about eliminating wrong answers. Don’t just read the answer choices — do something about them as you read, and you’ll notice an improvement in your time.
- Resist the urge to skim. Letting your eyes rapidly glaze their way down the passage or using the old “first and last sentence of each paragraph” trick actually costs you more time than it ends up saving you, because most of the time you just end up having to read the passage again more carefully after you see the question. Read the whole passage quickly and once, without laboring over the parts that you don’t fully get. It may feel like you’re going slower than you would by skimming, but all things considered, you’re actually not. Doing something right the first time is faster than doing it quickly but inefficiently the first time and then having to do it again.
- Don’t ponder skipping the question. Although the computer-delivered Praxis exam does allow you to skip and return to questions, keep in mind that doing so — or even thinking about doing so — can eat up more time than it would to simply force yourself to answer all the questions the first time around. Ten seconds spent wondering about whether you should skip each question really adds up!