The reading comprehension section

What the passages are like

The guide's own sample passage is an excerpt from a company website describing a service and the role of a named post within it. It is ordinary workplace prose rather than anything technical, which fits the guide's statement that no specialized knowledge of firefighting is required anywhere on this test.

Its sample question asks for the primary reason something is needed, and the published solution works through all four choices in turn, showing for each wrong one exactly which sentence of the passage contradicts it. That is a useful model of how these questions are built.

Where the marks are lost

On options that are true in the world but not in the passage, and on options that attach the right fact to the wrong party. The sample's wrong answers are exactly these: one credits the monitoring device with a job the passage gives to a person, another describes training on the wrong subject, a third invents a relationship the passage never mentions.

Underline who does what as you read. When a passage names several parties, most of the wrong answers will be a real duty against the wrong one.

A habit worth building

Before you mark an answer, find the sentence that makes it true. If you cannot point at one, you have inferred rather than read — and on this section that is usually the difference between a mark and a near miss.

Treat what a passage explicitly excludes as content too. A sentence saying that nobody described here is responsible for something is a fact about the passage, and it is answerable.

Related guides

• The four subject areas on the New York firefighter written test
• The training lesson section, and why it is not a memory test
• The arithmetic section: one table, one missing number