The paired passage consists of two separate passages, both focusing on science,
history, or social science. According to the College Board, the passages will
“oppose, support, or in some way complement” each other. They are usually
short and the questions will be less about one passage or the other and more
about how the two passages relate, how they draw different conclusions from the
same evidence, or how they draw the same conclusions from different evidence.
The key to the paired passages is figuring out how they
relate to each other.How to handle: The heart of answering the paired passage questions is
figuring out the relationship between the passages. You should be able to tell
easily whether the two passages agree or disagree.
If you’re having trouble figuring out the relationship, follow this general rule:
If the context and subject matter of the two passages seem quite different, then
their main points will almost certainly be similar. For instance, the Evil Testing
Serpent once paired a speech from ancient Greece and a speech from the Civil
War (two different historical eras and locales). These disparate passages had the
same view on war. An essay on silent film and one on mime (two different art
forms) showed the similarities between the two forms.
By contrast, another selection had two passages on architecture, both from
the twentieth century, and they disagreed. So if the two passages were written in
different times or places or if they concern different subjects, they probably
agree conceptually. If they talk about the same subject and were written in the
same time or place, they probably disagree.
READING TEST QUESTION TYPES
Luckily for you, the Serpent can ask only a few different types of questions on
the Reading Test. After all, it has promised to offer subscores on very specific
reading skills, and it needs to be able to show that one year’s score is comparable
to a score the next year. What this means for you is that once you get
comfortable with the question types, you can rest assured that nothing will
surprise you.
There are a few different types of questions, but they fall into four broad
categories and one mini-category. The broad categories are main idea questions,
meaning questions, structure questions, and rhetoric and vocabulary questions.