What kind of questions worth it to read beforehand?

[ganbayou]

Hi,
If I want to read questions before reading passages, what kind of questions worth it to read?
And what do not worth it to read?
I know ppl recommend not to read questions beforehand but I kind of need to...

Thank you

[ohthatpatrick]

I don't think I have any advice for you in this department, because I'm one of those people who doesn't get why we would try to read questions beforehand.

I can see someone thinking, "I'll look for the question with the earliest line reference and read up 'til that point in the passage, and then answer that question."

But I can't understand the supposed value in checking out all the question stems ahead of time.

Are you really good at finding the main point (specifically choosing which sentence or two represent the main point), articulating the author's purpose as soon as possible (usually by the end of the first paragraph), and mentally labeling each paragraph in terms of its content/purpose (we call that making a Passage Map)?

If you're not good at these front-end reading skills, I'm not sure why it would be a good idea to try to add MORE to what your brain is trying to do at that point by trying to also remember what you saw in question stems / answer choices.

The big picture question stems are not useful in advance, since you were going to read for the big picture anyway.

The question stems with no keywords in it are not useful in advance, since there's no hint as to what they're testing.

The question stems that ask about specific details/moments might be useful, but I worry that you would spend your brainpower looking for that detail, rather than on trying to understand the big picture of the passage.

[ganbayou]

Hi

Thanks for your reply.
I just found when a question asks the purpose of a paragraph, if I do not write down a few words to remind me of the content, I tend to spend too much time on this question cuz I have to re-read the whole paragraph again...I have a vague idea about what it talks about but sometimes I have 2 tempting answers and I had to read it again...so I thought reading Qstems will be helpful like LR questions.
But maybe no?

[ohthatpatrick]

Figuring out the purpose of each paragraph is ALWAYS part of your up-front reading job, whether they ask that type of question or not.

So I don't see, with that example, how you'd gain anything by reading that question stem first.

[romano.eric901]

I'd say it's better to partially run through the questions beforehand because when you read the passage after that, it'll strike you if you read the lines that could be the answer. Saved time that way as you know the questions beforehand.