Inference questions are some of the most commonly missed questions on the test. In these questions, you aren’t given every piece of information you’d need to solve the problem directly. Instead, you’re given part of the information and you have to infer the rest.
These questions don’t require you to guess randomly. That’s important. An inference is an educated guess, not a blind guess. Many students notice that some information seems to be missing and assume they have to guess without support. That’s not the case. You can use a consistent process to gather as much evidence as possible and then make the best inference you can.
The problem-solving process is detailed in the [Time management] chapter in the introduction section of this textbook. In this chapter, we’ll focus more closely on the last few steps so you can handle inference questions confidently. Below is the problem-solving process we’ll be referencing:
Read/annotate the question.
What location does the question give you?
What does the question want you to find?
Look for the answer. If you can’t find the answer, follow the rest of the steps.
Look at the list of answers to get an idea of what the question wants you to find.
Cross out any wrong answers and consider more closely any seemingly correct answers.
If you still do not have an answer, make your best educated guess.
Steps 4 through 6 are where you should usually find the solution. Step 7 is where you make an educated guess - but only after you’ve tried the earlier steps and still don’t have a clear answer. Let’s look more closely at Steps 4-7 so you know exactly what to do before you make an inference.
This is your first pass at finding the answer directly. Use the information provided (graphs, charts, tables, and the text) and try to point to the answer in the passage.
If you can’t find the answer in the available information, or you aren’t sure what you should be looking for, move on to the next step.
In Step 5, you look at the answer choices. This helps you understand what the question is really asking and what kind of result you’re supposed to find.
One of the most useful parts of this step is comparing the answer choices to what you just found in the passage. The choices can point you toward the specific detail, trend, or relationship you need.
Solving questions this way helps you:
If you still don’t have the answer, move to the next step.
This step prepares you to make an educated guess. Your goal is to eliminate choices that can’t be correct and identify the choices that seem most supported.
By identifying which answers are wrong and which might be correct, you reduce what you have to think about and focus on the details that matter most. This sets you up to make a much stronger inference if you still can’t fully solve the problem.
This is where you make your educated guess. If you’ve followed the process, you’ve already done everything reasonable to solve the problem within the time you have.
Inference questions often feel like this: you won’t find enough information to prove one answer with certainty, and more than one choice may “sound right.” That’s exactly when you use your best scientific reasoning to choose the most supported option.
The key point is that you don’t need to label a question as an inference question in advance. If you follow this process, you’ll naturally end up making the best possible guess based on the evidence you found and what you already know about science.
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