Factual questions ask for something the passage states outright. The paraphrase rule, why trap options repeat passage wording, and how to handle NOT items.
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Quick answer
A factual question asks for something the passage states directly, usually opening with "According to the passage". The correct answer is a paraphrase of one line, not a summary of a paragraph. Wrong options typically reuse the passage own wording while changing one detail, which is why answering from memory is the main source of error.
The most winnable question type in the section
Factual questions are the ones with an answer written down. No judgement, no reading between lines, no weighing of two defensible options. Somewhere in the passage there is a sentence, and if you find it and read it properly, the question is over.
Which makes it strange that students lose points on them. But they do, consistently, and the reason is almost never that they could not find the sentence. It is that they did not go and look. They read the passage four minutes earlier, they have a general impression of what it said, and the question feels familiar enough that going back seems unnecessary.
Then they select an option that matches their impression instead of the text, and the option that matches an impression is precisely what the wrong options are built to be. Test writers construct distractors from the passage vocabulary with one element altered. A number changed, a cause swapped for an effect, a "most" turned into an "all". Impressions do not store those details. Sentences do.
So the rule for this question type is one sentence long: never answer a factual question without your eyes on the line. It sounds too simple to be worth stating. It is also, in our experience of reviewing student results, the single highest-yield behavioural change available in Reading.
The paraphrase rule
Here is the mechanic that decides most factual questions, and it runs opposite to intuition.
The correct option is usually the one that says the same thing in different words. The wrong options are usually the ones that reuse the passage exact vocabulary while saying something slightly different.
Consider a passage sentence: "NREM sleep, which accounts for about 75 percent of a typical night, includes progressively deeper stages during which heart rate slows." A question asks which type of sleep accounts for roughly three quarters of a night. The correct option reads "Non-rapid eye movement sleep". A wrong option reads "Deep dreaming sleep", which recycles "deeper" and "sleep" from the sentence and attaches them to a category that does not exist.
This happens because a test writer who wants a plausible wrong answer has to build it out of something, and the most plausible-looking material is the passage itself. Lexical overlap is therefore weak evidence of correctness. It is often evidence of the opposite.
The working discipline: find the sentence, translate it into your own words in your head, then look for the option that matches your translation rather than the option that matches the sentence letter for letter. Students who do this stop being fooled by word matching almost immediately.
How wrong options are built
Recipe
How it looks
Example
Right answer to a different question
A true statement from the passage that does not answer the stem.
Stem asks for the submission deadline. Option gives the exhibition dates, which are also in the text.
One element altered
The passage sentence with a number, a name or a direction changed.
Passage says one third of food supply. Option says two thirds.
Passage says "most vivid dreaming occurs" in REM. Option says "dreaming occurs only" in REM.
Plausible but absent
Something entirely reasonable that the passage never says.
A passage on soil degradation, and an option about government subsidies that are never mentioned.
Five reliable distractor recipes. Once you can name them, you spot them in about two seconds each.
The 25 second procedure
1
Read the stem and extract the search term
Pick the one word or phrase from the stem that is most likely to appear in the passage as written. In "According to the passage, where does most evaporation occur?" the search term is "evaporation", not "occur". Nouns and technical terms travel intact into the passage. Verbs and function words do not.
2
Locate it in the passage
Use your paragraph summaries from the skim. You should already know which paragraph deals with the topic. Scan that paragraph for the search term rather than reading it.
3
Read the whole sentence, and the one after it
Not the clause your eye landed on. The whole sentence, plus the next one. Qualifications and exceptions live in the sentence after the claim, and half the distractors in this task are built out of ignoring them.
4
Paraphrase before you look at the options
Say the answer to yourself in your own words. Then read the options. This single habit neutralises the word-matching trap, because you are now comparing meanings rather than shopping for familiar vocabulary.
5
Commit and move
If you found the sentence and it says what the option says, you are done. Do not check the other three for completeness. Factual questions have one stated answer, and hunting for reasons the other options might work is how a 25 second question becomes a 70 second one.
The specific failure modes we see in student results
Answering from the wrong paragraph. Passages often mention the same term twice, once in passing and once substantively. A question about where most evaporation occurs will find "evaporation" in paragraph 1 as part of the general description of the water cycle and in paragraph 2 as the specific claim. Students take the first hit. Check whether the sentence you found actually contains the information the stem asked for, or merely the word.
Stopping at a comma. "Prolonged insufficient sleep has been linked to an elevated risk of cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, and weakened immune function." A student scanning for one item stops at the first and misses that the list has four members. NOT questions live on exactly this behaviour.
Confusing a definition with an example. Passages define a category then illustrate it. "procedural memories, such as learning to ride a bicycle or play a musical instrument". A question about what procedural memory is wants the category, not the bicycle. A question about what counts as procedural memory wants the bicycle. Read the stem carefully enough to know which you are being asked for.
Time bleed. A factual question that takes more than 40 seconds has gone wrong somewhere, usually because the search term was badly chosen and you are now reading the paragraph rather than scanning it. Reset: pick a different search term, ideally a proper noun or a number, and scan again. Reading the paragraph in full to find one fact is the slow route to a right answer, and the section does not have room for it.
Notice that none of these failures involve not understanding the passage. Factual questions almost never fail on comprehension. They fail on procedure, which is good news, because procedure is fixable in a week.
Factual question checklist
Never answer from memory. Locate the sentence every time.
Extract a search term from the stem before you look at the passage, preferably a noun, name or number.
Read the full sentence plus the one after it.
Paraphrase the answer in your own words before reading the options.
Be suspicious of the option that reuses the passage wording most closely.
For NOT questions, confirm the three options that are present rather than guessing the absent one.
Watch for qualifiers: most, some, usually, primarily. An option that drops the qualifier is wrong.
Cap yourself at 40 seconds. If you are over, change your search term rather than reading more.
Practice: five factual questions
All five use original stimuli in the style of our shipped tests. Two are NOT questions, because those are where the losses concentrate.
Electric vehicle range falls in cold weather, and the reason is chemical rather than mechanical. A lithium-ion cell works by moving lithium ions through a liquid electrolyte between two electrodes. As temperature drops, that electrolyte becomes more viscous, and ions move through it more slowly. The practical result is that the cell can deliver less current on demand and accepts charge more slowly. Manufacturers compensate by heating the battery pack before rapid charging, but the energy used for heating comes from the pack itself, which is why a winter journey consumes more stored energy per kilometre even when driving conditions are identical.
According to the passage, what happens to a lithium-ion battery electrolyte at low temperatures?
The passage states it directly: "that electrolyte becomes more viscous, and ions move through it more slowly". The correct option here is close to a verbatim restatement, which happens, but note that you could only be confident by reading the sentence rather than recalling that "cold is bad for batteries".The passage never says the electrolyte freezes. "More viscous" and "frozen solid" are different claims, and this option overstates a gradual change into a total one, which is the overstated-scope recipe.Heating is mentioned, but the passage says manufacturers heat the battery pack before rapid charging. Nothing is replaced with a gel. This option takes a real word from the passage and builds an invented mechanism around it.Thermal expansion and electrode spacing appear nowhere in the passage. It sounds like plausible physics, which is the entire design of a plausible-but-absent distractor.
Manufacturers compensate by heating the battery pack before rapid charging, but the energy used for heating comes from the pack itself, which is why a winter journey consumes more stored energy per kilometre even when driving conditions are identical.
According to the passage, why does a winter journey consume more stored energy per kilometre?
The causal chain is stated with "which is why": heating energy comes from the pack, therefore more stored energy is consumed per kilometre. When a passage hands you an explicit causal connective, the factual answer is on the other side of it.The passage explicitly rules driving conditions out with "even when driving conditions are identical". An option contradicting a stated control condition cannot be the cause the passage gives.Aerodynamic drag is never mentioned. It is real physics and irrelevant here, which makes it a textbook plausible-but-absent option.The passage says the cell delivers less current on demand and charges more slowly, not that total capacity shrinks. This is the one-element-altered recipe: a related claim with a different meaning.
Roman builders developed a concrete that has outlasted most of what has been poured since. Its key ingredient was volcanic ash, which reacted with lime and seawater to form durable mineral structures that continued to strengthen over time. The material made possible the vast unsupported dome of the Pantheon, the aqueduct channels that carried water into the city, and harbour breakwaters that have stood in seawater for two thousand years. Roman engineers also used it for the foundations of large public bathhouses, where its resistance to moisture mattered as much as its strength. Modern researchers study these mixtures partly because producing conventional cement releases substantial quantities of carbon dioxide.
Which of the following is NOT mentioned in the passage as a use of Roman concrete?
Roads are never mentioned. The passage lists the Pantheon dome, aqueduct channels, harbour breakwaters and bathhouse foundations. Roman roads are famous, which is exactly why this option works: it comes from your general knowledge rather than from the text, and NOT questions punish exactly that.Harbour breakwaters appear in sentence three, described as having stood in seawater for two thousand years.Aqueduct channels appear in the same sentence, listed between the Pantheon and the breakwaters.Bathhouse foundations appear in the fourth sentence, along with the reason moisture resistance mattered there.
Its key ingredient was volcanic ash, which reacted with lime and seawater to form durable mineral structures that continued to strengthen over time.
According to the passage, what made Roman concrete continue to strengthen over time?
The sentence gives the mechanism in full: volcanic ash reacted with lime and seawater to form mineral structures that kept strengthening. Three named inputs, one stated result.Compression under load is not mentioned anywhere. It is an intuitively appealing explanation for old buildings surviving, which is what makes it a useful distractor.Carbon dioxide appears in the last sentence, and it concerns modern cement production, not Roman strengthening. This is the right-answer-to-a-different-question recipe, using a real term from a different part of the passage.Moisture is mentioned only in connection with bathhouse foundations, where the point is resistance to moisture rather than absorption of it. The option inverts the passage claim.
In parts of Mozambique, a wild bird leads people to wild bee nests. The greater honeyguide responds to a specific call used by local honey hunters, then flies ahead in short stages, waiting for the humans to follow. When the nest is found, the hunters open it with smoke and take the honeycomb, leaving behind the wax and larvae that the bird eats. Researchers who tested the relationship found that the honeyguide call increased the chance of locating a nest from about sixteen percent to roughly fifty-four percent, and that the birds did not respond in the same way to arbitrary human sounds. The partnership appears to be learned rather than inherited, since the specific calls differ between regions.
Which of the following is NOT stated in the passage about honeyguide birds?
The passage says the hunters take the honeycomb and the bird gets the wax and larvae. The bird is not paid in honeycomb, it is paid in what is left after the honeycomb is removed. One element altered, and the alteration is easy to miss because the sentence contains all three words.This is stated: the birds "did not respond in the same way to arbitrary human sounds", which is the contrast the sentence draws with the specific call.This is stated: "leaving behind the wax and larvae that the bird eats".This is stated in the final sentence, where regional variation in calls is given as the reason the partnership looks learned rather than inherited.
Turning this into a drill
Factual questions respond to a very specific kind of practice, and it is not "do more reading tests". It is this: take a passage you have already worked, cover the options, and answer every factual question in your own words from the text. Write the sentence number you used. Then uncover the options and pick.
What you are training is the gap between finding the sentence and choosing the option, because that gap is where the errors happen. Students who can produce the answer unprompted almost never pick a distractor. Students who go straight to the options are shopping, and the shop is stocked with things designed to look right.
Do this on ten passages. Then do a timed test and watch your factual accuracy. If it has not moved, the problem is not procedure but pace, and you should be in the pacing lesson instead.
One last note on expectations. Factual questions should be close to your best question type. If you are losing more than one per test, that is not a comprehension issue and it is not bad luck. It is a habit of answering before looking, and it is worth an entire study session to break.
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8 more sections in this lesson
You have read the opening. The rest covers the method in full, with worked examples and practice questions that explain why each wrong answer is wrong.
All 45 lessons: Reading, Listening, Writing and Speaking
Real exam audio and record-yourself speaking drills
The stem usually begins "According to the passage" or "According to paragraph 3", or it asks a direct question about content. The negative form asks which option is NOT mentioned or NOT true.
Distractors are built from passage vocabulary with one element altered, because that is what makes them look plausible. The correct option is more often a paraphrase, so lexical overlap is weak evidence of correctness.
About 25 seconds, and no more than 40. If you are over, your search term was poorly chosen and you should pick a different one rather than reading the paragraph in full.
Check each option against the passage and confirm the three that are present. The one you cannot find is the answer. Trying to sense which one is absent leads to picking an option that is present but felt unfamiliar.
You can, and it is the single largest source of avoidable error in Reading. General impressions do not store the details the distractors are built from, so put your eyes back on the line every time.
Check that the sentence you found actually contains the information the stem asked for rather than just the word. Passages frequently mention a term in passing before treating it substantively.