The author's objection to the second hypothesis discussed in the passage is most applicable to which one of the follo...
MazenJanuary 27, 2020
The difficulty Level of this passage please.
Hello,
Generally, I find science passages more challenging and time consuming. Acknowledging this, however, I found this particular passage extraordinarily difficult; more difficult relative to other science passages.
If I may, my question is: on a scale of your expert choosing, (or if you deem appropriate, on a scale from 1-to-5, 5 being most difficult), where does this passage rate?
Thank you
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Unfortunately, this question is difficult to answer because I can only see the first question of the passage. However, I will give you some trends I've noticed.
There are different kinds of things that can make a passage difficult. One obvious factor is the difficulty of the language - something science passages are notorious for. However, reading comprehension is a multifaceted section. Often, a difficultly written passage is accompanied by straightforward questions. I see a fair amount of this with science passages. For those, the goal is to follow the text and know what happens where, and how those happenings interact with one another (if you don't understand the nitty gritty, that's okay - you usually just need the big picture of how things work together). Successfully following the interactions/processes being described can also make it easier to refer back to places in the text (because you'll know where to look) if you get a question that asks you to go deeper for details into a scientific process (for example, putting things together for inference questions).
That being said, some passages will feel like an easier, more familiar read. That doesn't necessarily mean those passages are easy - multiple viewpoints, author and critic attitudes, secondary structures (examples, lists, etc.), and other elements can make for a brutal set of questions that require a lot of reading between the lines.
Sometimes, a difficult passage will be a combination of these situations - unfamiliar text (where the reader likely has no context to ground what they're reading in) that's difficult to declutter in your mind, many viewpoints or attitudes expressed in a passage, several hypothesizes or conclusions being posed in a passage, and elements in both the passage itself and/or the questions that force the test taker to read between the lines and make some deductions about what the things being said actually mean.
If you're having difficulty with this passage, my best advice is to do it completely untimed. If you complete the passage untimed and still get some of the questions wrong, then the concepts being tested in those questions are probably the skills you need to strengthen. Reading comp starts to click when you get every question right, not when you finish the passages as quickly as possible (unless, of course, you're doing both of those at the same time, haha!).
Hope this helps @Mazen!
MazenJanuary 28, 2020
AndreaK,
I am impressed with your response. It is both instructive and comprehensive! Two instructions are especially beneficial to me: first, the strategy to deal with getting wrong answers even when untimed is indicative of weaknesses in the skill being tested; and second, don't underestimate easy-to-read passages they are set up for a "brutal" set of questions.
