50–50 Odds Aren’t Bad. True or False?
What can you do to increase your scores on true/false tests? Be more
inclined to guess if you have to. After all, I encouraged you to guess
on a multiple-choice test if you could eliminate enough wrong answers
to get down to two, one of which is correct. Well, you’re already
there! So, unless you are being penalized for guessing, guess away!
Even if you are being penalized, you may want to take a shot if
you have the faintest clue of the correct answer.
In fact, your odds are often better than 50-50. Most test preparers
tend to include more “true” statements than false. So if you really
don’t have any way to determine the truth of a statement, presume
it is true. If there is a specific detail in the statement—“There are
206 bones in the adult human body”—it may also tend to be true.
Remember: For a statement to be true, every partof that statement
must be true. Be careful of statements whose parts aretrue (or at
least maybe true), linked in such a way that the wholestatement
becomes false. Example: “Since many birds can fly, they use stones
to grind their food.” Many birds dofly, and birds doswallow stones to
grind their food, but a causal relationship(the word “since”) between
the two clauses makes the wholestatement false.
The longer and/or more complicated a statement in a true/false test,
the less likely it’s true, since every clause of it must be true (and there
are so many chances for a single part of it to be false).
Be careful of double negatives: A statement claiming that something
is “not uncommon” actually means that it is common.
Chapter 8 ■ How to Study for Tests 197