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Strongly supported inferences | Quick guide

A quick guide to approaching questions that ask you to identify something that is "strongly supported"

On questions that ask you to find the choice that is most strongly supported by a stimulus, the answer does not have to be conclusively supported by the passage. It just has to be the choice that is most supported by the passage. This distinguishes strongly supported questions from Implication questions.

Prediction isn’t always worth the effort

Generally, it’s not a good use of your time to try to predict the content of the answers to these questions. This is slightly different from Implication questions, whose stimuli can usually be characterized as “support in search of a conclusion.” You’ll generally need to test each choice. Before you do that, though, you’ll want to understand the passage.

How to understand the passage

✓ Look for relationships: Are there ways in which statements relate to each other? If so, you can connect overlapping ideas. For example, does X connect with Y, which connects with Z? You can predict that X connects with Z.
✓ Diagram any conditional statements: Are there conditional statements that act like rules? If so, it may make sense to diagram them.
✓ Make a sketch: Is the situation complex enough to warrant a quick sketch of the action?
✓ Note strong language Are there strong statements to pay attention to, such as “all,” “must,” “any,” “ever,” “never” and “everyone”?
✓ Note weak language: Are there weaker, qualified statements, including words such as “some,” “many,” and “may,” “sometimes” “usually” and “often”? If the passage is entirely qualified, then it’s highly unlikely that a strong statement can follow from that passage.

Test the choices

✓ Ask “Is it supported?” Test each choice by asking yourself if that statement can be reasonably concluded from the passage, based on the facts in the passage.
✓ Don’t use your imagination! Resist the urge to “fill in the blanks yourself”, which usually entails adding assumptions to try to “force” a choice to work.
✓ Read with precision! “Most” is not the same thing as “some”; “at least two” is not the same thing as “at most two”; “X can be dangerous” is not the same thing as “X shouldn’t be done.”
✓ Verify: To verify your choice, ensure that you can point to different parts of the passage that support the statement you’ve chosen. Speculation isn’t good enough to support an inference.

Common wrong choice types

  • Too strong/extreme: Some wrong choices are statements that go beyond the truth of the passage by being too extreme,
  • Probably/Might be true: Some wrong choices are statements that could very well be true but we can’t be 100% certain from the information provided.

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