Multiple choice, single answer: a method for the tricky options

In a single-answer question, the wrong options are written to look attractive. If you read the whole passage, glance at the choices and pick the one that feels familiar, you are doing exactly what the question writer hoped. The cure is to know what you are hunting for before you read, and to know the usual shapes a wrong option takes.

Read the question first, then hunt

Read the question before the passage and say to yourself what kind of answer it wants: a reason, a result, the writer's opinion, a comparison, a detail. Then read with that in mind. When you reach the sentence that deals with it, hold on to it. Often the evidence is one sentence, or two.

Next comes the step many people skip: predict the answer in your own words before you weigh the options. Look at the passage, not the choices, while you do it. A rough prediction gives you something to compare against, and it protects you from options that merely sound good.

Options usually paraphrase the passage. The correct one often shares few words with the text, while a wrong one may copy phrases directly, because borrowed words feel safe. A match in vocabulary is a reason to check an option, not a reason to choose it.

The four shapes of a wrong option

• Partly true. The first half matches the passage and the second half does not. Read to the end of every option.
• True but not asked. The statement is in the passage, but it answers a different question.
• Too extreme. Always, never, completely, the only: the passage said "often" or "mainly".
• Reversed. Cause and effect swapped, "more" and "less" exchanged, or two groups turned round.

Learn to name them. Once you can say "that one is true but not asked", you stop being tempted by it.

A worked analysis

An illustrative passage and question of my own, with five options for practice.

1. The question asks for the director's conclusion, so the word to find is "concluded". The evidence is one sentence.
2. Prediction: more people know about the museum, and local habits are unchanged.
3. A is partly true. Sundays did rise, but weekday numbers barely changed, so local people did not return.
4. B is true but not asked. It is what the staff found, not what the director concluded.
5. D is reversed. The two halves of the conclusion have swapped places.
6. E is too extreme. "Complete failure" and "should be dropped" are far stronger than anything in the passage.
7. C matches the prediction, in different words from the text.

Four options fell by elimination, each for a reason you can name, and only then did C have to prove itself. Notice too that A, B and D all borrow phrases from the passage: "weekdays", "outside the town", "habits of people living nearby". The right answer is the one that says it in new words.

Time per question

Set a ceiling before you start, and check the on-screen instructions for how your time is counted. For a short passage, about ninety seconds is a reasonable starting point, to be adjusted after a few tries. If you are past your ceiling with two options still alive, go back to your evidence sentence and ask which option claims something it does not say. Then choose and move on. Time spent here is time taken from a question you have not seen yet.

A drill that finds your habit

After every single-answer question you practise, label the wrong option that tempted you: partly true, true but not asked, too extreme or reversed. After ten questions you will know which shape you fall for. Many people turn out to have a favourite.

Then write your own. Take a paragraph from the news, write one question and five options (the right answer plus one wrong option of each shape), and answer it again tomorrow. Ten minutes of this teaches you to see the shapes in real questions.

For your next step, try one single-answer question in the practice tests on this site and write down the evidence sentence before you commit. Keeping an error log shows how to track the labels week by week, and multiple answers and negative marking covers the sister task.