Inference questions are some of the most commonly missed questions on the test. Inference questions do not provide you with all the information to solve the problem given. Instead, they give you a part of the information and require you to infer the rest of the solution.
These questions do not require you to guess. That is very important to remember! An inference is an educated guess, not a blind guess. Oftentimes students believe that they cannot find all of the information and thus need to make a blind guess on these questions. This is not the case! We will go over a consistent way to solve inference questions to the best of your ability, making educated guesses instead of blind ones.
The problem-solving process is detailed in the [Time management] chapter in the introduction section of this textbook. Hopefully you have read this and considered the steps. In this chapter, we will dig a bit deeper into the last few steps of this process so that you can be confident with inference questions. Below is the problem-solving process we will 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 the steps where you should find the solution to the problem you are solving. The final step is when you should make your educated guess. This means that you should only make your educated guess after you have tried everything else and still haven’t found the answer. Let’s look into these steps so you know exactly what you should try before you make that inference!
This step is the first round of looking for the answer. This is when you refer to graphs, charts, tables, and the text. You are trying to point to the answer somewhere in the passage. We love these questions because they are quick and clear. Remember not to read the whole passage; you just need to scan for the key points from the question. If you can’t find the answer after looking through the available information or if you are having a hard time understanding what to look for, move onto the next step.
In Step 5 you look at the answers of the question. Doing this gives you an idea of what the question expects you to find and can also help you understand what the question is asking in general. One of the most helpful things about this step is that you can compare the answers to everything you just read from the passage.
Solving questions in this way ensures that you know what you are looking for, that you have looked in the proper places that the question guides you to, and that you have an idea of what you should end up with as a final solution. If you have not yet found the answer, move to the next step.
This step is the preparation you make before making an educated guess. The hope is that by crossing out answers you can narrow your choices down to a single, correct answer. However, this is not always the case. You should look for answers that seem obviously wrong and cross them out. On the other hand, you might want to identify answers that seem more correct than the others and mark those as more likely answers.
By marking up which answers you think are wrong and which answers you think could be correct, you narrow down the details that you have to focus on. Also, you set yourself up to make a much more educated guess!
Here is where you make your educated guess. By following this process you have guaranteed that there is nothing else you could do within a reasonable time to solve this problem. This also helps you recognize inference questions because you will not have found enough information in the passage and will likely think that some of the answers “sound right.”
The key thing to remember is that you don’t need to recognize a question as an inference question to make a good educated guess. If you follow this process, you will naturally make your best guess with all the information you have found and with everything you already know about science.