Detail question: how to go back to the passage??

[ganbayou]

I cannot go back to the exact right place to find the answer. I sort of have an idea about where the info is or which paragraph it is from, but not sure about the exact sentences...How do you do this? Do you re-read the whole paragraph when you think "probably in this paragraph..." or can you find the exact place?

We cannot anticipate what detail questions they would ask, can we?
I mean...for attitude or big picture questions, we can sort of anticipate while reading because they always ask kind of same questions but for those detail questions they can ask anything right?

[ohthatpatrick]

Unfortunately, I don't think there's much of a scientific answer here.

You nailed the part we CAN work on -- the better we are about making a Passage Map as we read (i.e. defining the purpose/content of each passage), the better we'll be at predicting which paragraph is the right place to start looking.

But beyond that, I actually see a lot of variety among myself and my students about how quickly they can scan and find a given keyword or phrase.

You certainly prioritize searching for the weirdest noun/adjective that's part of the keywords.

If any of the words are capitalized, those are generally easier to find.

You might want to experiment with reading the passage more slowly (or giving it a 30 sec skim AFTER you've read it the first time). I seem to remember more quickly than my students where something was said, because the actual words the author chose still ring musically in my ears, and I know what nearby idea they are connected to.

So it's a case where the rich get richer --- the better you understand the passage as you're reading it, the more vivid a memory you have about where the author said what. And if the keywords are enough to remind you of an idea the author expressed, then you would be able to know by the topic of that idea which paragraph it would be found in.

The worst cases are when the question asks about a term that gets used throughout the passage. At that point, you might have to scan most of the passage to know you picked up on all the available details.

Another annoying situation is just an open ended Inference question with no keywords: f.e. "Which of the following is most supported by the passage?"

In these cases, we might have to look up five different answer choices each tempting us with a pseudo-fact from five different spots of the passage.

That's why it's important to have a good ear for extreme language, so that you can filter out the unlikely answer choices and prioritize your time trying to look up and confirm the remaining choices.