The Passage Based Reading section on the SAT consists of 48 multiple choice questions designed to test your ability to understand the information contained within passages. The questions will test things like whether you are able to draw conclusions from the information given in the passage, whether you can infer the authors tone or attitude from the content, whether you can understand words within the passage, and whether you can simply comprehend what you are reading. The major types of questions include:
- Factual questions: questions that ask about specific statements or facts contained within the passage
- Vocabulary in context questions: questions that ask you what a word means within the context of the sentence (these types of questions are very similar to sentence completion questions)
- Questions about the author's tone, attitude, or intent: questions that want to know what the author thinks or feels about what they are writing, or why the author included a particular phrase or example within the passage
- Inference or assumption questions: questions that ask you to determine something else that is probably true based on the information in the passage, or questions that ask you what the author assumed was true when he made his argument
- General questions: questions that ask about the main idea of the passage, or the purpose of the passage as a whole.
The passages are academic passages and generally fall into one of four subject categories:
- Humanities:
- Social Sciences
- Natural sciences
- Literary fiction.
Scientific passages will usually ask more detailed questions about the content of the passage, while fiction passages tend to focus more on the relationships between the characters.
