Coupled answer questions | Types of questions | ACT Science

There are always four answers to choose from for each science question. Some questions have their choices organized in a pattern. One of the most common patterns is one that relates two choices to each other. These are called coupled-answer questions. They are very nice questions because they help you cross answers out and solve the problem by process of elimination. Sometimes, you can find the solution even if you don’t understand the question!

Recognizing the pattern

Coupled-answer questions are split up into two parts and each one is usually coupled with another that is similar. Let’s look at an example so that this makes sense:

A student believes that oxygen should be used instead of nitrogen for his experiment.

A new claim says that oxygen is less effective than nitrogen for the experiment that the student is running. Based on this claim, should the student use oxygen or nitrogen in his experiment?

A) Oxygen; oxygen is less effective than nitrogen in this case
B) Oxygen; nitrogen is less effective than oxygen in this case
C) Nitrogen; oxygen is less effective than nitrogen in this case
D) Nitrogen; nitrogen is less effective than oxygen in this case

In the example above, we can see a pattern as follows:

A) answer 1; answer 3
B) answer 1; answer 4
C) answer 2; answer 3
D) answer 2; answer 4

There are often several of these questions per test, and usually at least one of them per passage. Recognizing this pattern is the first step to taking advantage of these questions! Now, we need to see how this is helpful to us.

Using the pattern

There are two steps you should take as soon as you find a coupled answer question. First, you should try to find a detail that will prove or disprove something in the answers. This typically lets you cross out two answers. Second, you should compare the final two answers to find out exactly how they are different from each other. This helps narrow down the exact detail that you need to find in order to solve the problem!

Let’s begin with this first step. If we can prove one of the four answer types to be wrong, then we can immediately cross out two answers. Let’s continue our original example above to show this. Since oxygen is less effective than nitrogen, we can cross out answers B and D because they say the opposite:

A) Oxygen; oxygen is less effective than nitrogen in this case
~~B) Oxygen; nitrogen is less effective than oxygen in this case~~
C) Nitrogen; oxygen is less effective than nitrogen in this case
~~D) Nitrogen; nitrogen is less effective than oxygen in this case~~

Now, we have narrowed down our answers to just two! That has doubled your odds of guessing the right answer and has helped narrow down exactly what you need to look for next. In our case, we need to answer the first part of the question: should he use oxygen or nitrogen? If oxygen is less effective than nitrogen, then he should use nitrogen for his experiments. That means we can now select our final answer:

~~A) Oxygen; oxygen is less effective than nitrogen in this case~~
~~B) Oxygen; nitrogen is less effective than oxygen in this case~~
C) Nitrogen; oxygen is less effective than nitrogen in this case
~~D) Nitrogen; nitrogen is less effective than oxygen in this case~~

The answer to this example is C.

Notice that we have no idea what the student’s experiment actually does. We also don’t know why nitrogen is more effective than oxygen. The key here is that we don’t need to know!

Segments of the answers

Sometimes you can be intimidated by using these answers because you don’t already know which answers have a correct first half of the solution. In our example above, we didn’t start by looking at the first half of the question (oxygen or nitrogen). Instead, we started by dealing with the latter half, which simply pointed us to what the question says about effectiveness. Only after we found the correct second half could we understand which answer also had the correct first half.

Begin comparing these answers by trying to figure out which half of the answers are easiest to prove or disprove. It’s all up to you to decide where to begin with these questions. The most important concept is that you look for a single detail that you can prove or disprove. Once you do this, you can cross out two answers and narrow down exactly what you are looking for!

Key points

Coupled-answer questions. Look out for any set of answers that has its answers paired together. By crossing out answers, you can sometimes solve these questions without even understanding them.

Elimination. Eliminate answers that seem incomplete or wrong. Sometimes they may seem wrong by common sense, in which case you should definitely cross them out!

Use the pattern. Follow the pattern for coupled-answer questions to solve them quickly and efficiently: prove one detail wrong, cross out the two answers that have that detail, identify the difference between the last two answers, then find that solution in the passage.