Multiple Choice Questions – 45% of the entire exam score

Some tips:
a.) Look through all passages and put them in order of preference (easiest to
hardest)
b.) Skim the answers before reading the passage – do the answers help guide you
in your reading?
c.) Look at the italics or context of the piece – do they give you any background?
How does this background apply?
d.) Practice warming-up your brain before attacking
e.) Stay active as a reader – always annotating as you read – if you are not
annotating, you are not being an active reader

Reading the passage:

1. Read and highlight the first and last sentence of the passage
2. Read and highlight the first sentences in each paragraph
3. Write at the top of the page:
a. Tone:
b. Purpose:
c. Audience:
d. Subject:
e. Context:
4. Find and highlight shifts in the passage
5. Look for patterns, repetition and contrasts in the text
6. Find “ripples” in the text (places that “flag” you in your reading)
7. How is the passage organized?

Types of questions:
1. Tone
2. Meaning in context
3. Literary elements
4. Purpose
5. How words function or what they refer to
6. Rhetorical strategies
7. Shifts
8. Metaphor
9. Speaker’s perspective

Answering the questions:

1. Make note of all words such as: always, never, universally, etc
2. For “line number” questions, look over the sentences before and after the
indicated lines
3. Look at the first word of answers a-e, can you eliminate any answers based on
this?
4. Cross out answers which you KNOW to be untrue
5. Leave question blank if you can’t eliminate at least two answers
6. After reading question, answer it without looking at the provided answers
Some Facts:
- You can get as few as 1/3 of the multiple choice questions incorrect and if you
score at least an average of 5 on the free-response questions, you can receive a 3.
- As many as 50% of the questions may require students to refer to a line or lines
inside the passage
- The answer to most rhetorical strategies questions is a simple one
- The answer to meaning in context questions almost never involves the most
common definition
- More often than not, there will be a question about the first sentence of a passage
- Ironically, short passages may often be more difficult than longer ones
- You will often be asked to understand the function or purpose of a sentence
- Distracters may contain bombastic language, textual allusions, or faulty textual
evidence
- There is almost always a question in every passage which asks about tone, attitude
or narrative style
- Direct questions involving rhetorical are marked incorrectly by half the students
- Among questions involving combinations of I, II, III, the choice with only one
Roman numeral is almost never the right often. Most often the correct answer is
the one with two Roman numerals
- Usually, no two questions in a row are hard
- Often the difficulty increases from the first passage to the last passage
- “What does this line refer to?” questions are the most commonly missed
- The overall most commonly missed questions deal with inference, tone,
interpretation and connotation
- The most difficult questions are the ones that ask students to find “all of the
following EXCEPT” – consider saving these for last
- You should practice taking an entire multiple choice section while timed several
times before the actual exam
- Practice multiple choice questions with a watch
- Chart your progress on a multiple choice chart – track your growth
- All multiple choice questions are worth the same points!
- When a question refers to the meaning of a word or phrase in context, always look
at the sentences before and after
- If you are running out of time, look for the shortest questions or the questions
which don’t require you to refer back to the text
Tricks ! (watch out!)
1. Irrelevant: doesn’t answer the question (biggest trick)!
2. Contradiction: make sure you paraphrase the passage correctly!
3. No evidence: never addressed in the first place!
4. Unreasonable: occasionally just silly
5. Too general or too specific – too broad or too narrow!