What a factual information question asks
A factual information question asks you to identify something the passage states explicitly. The stem usually begins "According to paragraph 2…" or "The passage states that…" and the correct answer is a paraphrase of one specific sentence in the passage. Factual questions are the most common Reading question type, appearing two or three times per passage. Students often assume these are easy and so attack them carelessly; in practice they have one of the highest miss rates because the distractors are deliberately built to sound right.
The three families of factual distractor are: paraphrase distortion (a sentence from the passage with one detail flipped), out-of-scope facts (true statements the passage never made), and partial truth (correct as far as it goes, but missing the key qualifier in the original). The walkthrough below shows one of each.
Passage
Read the passage. The question targets paragraph 2.
1 The earliest known paper money was issued in eleventh-century Sichuan, in southwestern China, by a group of sixteen merchant houses that had collectively grown wealthy on the salt trade. Their original note — called jiaozi — was not currency in the modern sense; it was a transferable receipt for iron coins held in the houses’ vaults. A merchant travelling north could deposit the heavy coins, take a paper certificate, and exchange the certificate for coins at any of the houses’ partner offices.
2 The Song dynasty government nationalised the scheme in 1023 after watching the merchant houses prosper from it for nearly two decades. The state established the Office of Jiaozi in the regional capital, set strict limits on how many notes could be issued in any three-year window, and made counterfeiting punishable by death. For its first thirty years the government scheme worked: notes circulated at face value, the regional economy expanded, and the state collected a small fee on every exchange. After 1059, however, military pressure on the dynasty’s northern frontier required emergency expenditure that could not be met from tax revenue. The Office of Jiaozi was repeatedly instructed to issue notes beyond the legal limit. Each round of over-issue lowered the notes’ market value relative to the iron coins they were supposed to represent.
3 By the early twelfth century, the divergence between face value and market value had become severe. A note nominally worth one thousand coins could be exchanged in markets for as few as four hundred. The government attempted several reforms — withdrawing old notes from circulation, issuing new ones at a higher denomination, even briefly converting the system to a copper standard — but each reform was undone by further fiscal pressure within a generation.
4 The Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century inherited and extended the paper-money system across China and into Persia. By the time European travellers reached the court of Kublai Khan, paper currency was an accepted feature of long-distance trade across much of Asia, four centuries before any European state issued comparable notes.
Question
Q. According to paragraph 2, why did the value of the government-issued jiaozi begin to fall?
Why option B is correct
Paragraph 2 states it almost directly: "military pressure on the dynasty’s northern frontier required emergency expenditure that could not be met from tax revenue. The Office of Jiaozi was repeatedly instructed to issue notes beyond the legal limit. Each round of over-issue lowered the notes’ market value relative to the iron coins they were supposed to represent." Option B paraphrases this cleanly: notes issued beyond the legal limit, motivated by military expenditure. The mechanism (over-issue) and the cause (frontier military spending) both match. A correct factual answer is almost always a sentence-level paraphrase of one or two consecutive sentences in the passage.
Why option A is wrong
This is a paraphrase-distortion distractor. The passage mentions counterfeiting (punishable by death) in paragraph 2, and the Office of Jiaozi is a real entity in the passage. Combining the two into "the Office began counterfeiting its own notes" lifts vocabulary that does appear in the passage but assembles it into a claim the passage never makes. Furthermore, the motive given — "to reduce overall demand" — is the opposite of what a state worried about its frontier would want. Distractors built from real vocabulary in implausible combinations are the most common form of factual-question trap.
Why option C is wrong
This is an out-of-scope distractor. The original sixteen merchant houses are mentioned in paragraph 1, where their scheme is described and then nationalised. The passage does not say what happened to the houses afterwards. The story about them "re-entering the market" is plausible-sounding because the merchant houses are part of the passage’s topic, but no sentence supports it. On factual questions, "plausible but unsupported" is the same as wrong.
Why option D is wrong
This is a partial-truth distractor. The passage does describe the divergence between the note’s face value and its market value (paragraph 3). The mechanism in option D — a fall in the value of iron — would technically produce a similar effect. But the passage gives a specific reason for the divergence: over-issue. A correct factual answer matches the cause the passage names, not a different cause that would also have produced the observed outcome. Watch for distractors that invent a different mechanism with the same end result; they reward students who only check the conclusion of a passage and skip the explanation.
How to approach factual questions on test day
- Re-read the named paragraph after reading each option. Do not answer from memory.
- Find the single sentence that the correct answer paraphrases. If you cannot locate it, the option you are leaning towards is probably wrong.
- Watch for distractors that combine real vocabulary into combinations the passage never made. These are the highest-frequency traps.
- If an option sounds true but you cannot find it in the passage, it is out-of-scope. Eliminate.
- If two options describe the same outcome but through different mechanisms, the right answer is the one whose mechanism appears explicitly in the text.
- Factual questions usually have a literal one-sentence answer in the passage. If you find yourself building a complex justification across three paragraphs, you are answering the wrong question type.
Factual vs negative factual questions
A close relative of the factual question is the negative factual ("Which of the following is NOT mentioned in paragraph 2?"). Negative factual is the same skill in reverse: three options paraphrase real sentences from the passage; one option says something the passage does not. Students who handle factual questions confidently often slip on negative factual because they pick the most familiar-sounding option instead of the one that is missing. If the stem contains "NOT" or "EXCEPT," circle it before reading the options to remind yourself the task is inverted.
Practise factual questions on a timed test
Each TOEFLMock Reading practice test contains two or three factual questions per passage at official density.
Try a Reading practice test