Read an Academic Passage — skim, scan, and point at the line
What the academic passage asks
- A passage of the kind a first-year university course would set, with questions after it.
- It is written for a general reader, not a specialist. You are never expected to know the subject.
- Every answer is in the passage. If you cannot point at the line, it is not the answer.
Skim, then scan
- Skim for thirty seconds: what is this about, how many parts, where does the argument turn?
- Then answer, and scan back for each fact. You are looking up, not re-reading.
- A paragraph's topic sentence — usually its first — says what that paragraph is for. Questions about "which paragraph" are matched against topic sentences.
A question asks which paragraph explains a cause. What do you compare it against?
A topic sentence says what its paragraph is for. Matching against them turns re-reading the whole passage into four quick comparisons.
Words in context, and word parts
- A vocabulary question asks what a word means in this passage, not in general.
- Guess from the parts: a prefix (un-, re-, over-) and a suffix (-tion, -able, -ly) fix the meaning and the word class before you know the root.
- The passage will say the same thing in different words on purpose. A synonym is the normal case, not a trick.
A vocabulary question is asking for the word's usual dictionary meaning.
It asks what the word means in THIS passage. Answer from the sentence, not from memory.
Inference is still evidence
- An inference question asks what the passage lets you conclude, not what it states.
- The right answer is always supported by a line. The wrong ones are true in general but not supported here.
- Test each option with: which sentence makes this necessary? No sentence, no answer.
Two options are both plausible. How do you choose?
Wrong options in this task are usually true in general and unsupported here. 'Which sentence makes this necessary?' separates them every time.
How to practise
- Read one academic page a day without a dictionary, then look up only the words that blocked you.
- Translating while you read costs two to three times the speed, and at 50 items in 30 minutes there is no room for it.
- Format facts checked on the ETS website on 13 September 2026.
Translating each sentence into Chinese as you read is a safe way to be accurate.
It costs two to three times the reading speed, and the section gives about 30 minutes for about 50 items. It is also a habit that takes weeks to lose, so start now.