Language Fluency
Two different tasks share this heading. One gives you a short passage and four summaries of it, and asks which reports it most clearly and accurately. The other gives you four numbered lines of prose, one of which contains a spelling, grammar or punctuation error, and asks which line.
The summary task, and what actually decides it
Every option will be about the right incident, and every option will read fluently. What separates them is completeness and fidelity: the best summary carries every fact the passage states and adds nothing the passage does not.
The fault that catches most people is a summary that upgrades a SUSPICION into a fact. If the passage says somebody suspected a neighbor was responsible, a summary saying the neighbor did it has changed the account, however well it reads.
How to work it
The task rewards a fixed procedure more than it rewards reading quickly, because every option is designed to be plausible.
- List the facts the passage states before you read a single option.
- Strike any option that drops one of them — an incomplete summary is wrong even when everything in it is true.
- Strike any option that adds a fact, a name or a conclusion the passage never gave.
- Watch the hedges: suspected, appeared, believed. A summary has to keep them.
The error-line task
Here the whole passage is one continuous piece of writing broken into four numbered lines, and exactly one line carries a fault. It may be a misspelling, a subject and verb that do not agree, or a missing apostrophe.
Homophones do most of the work: knew and new, their and there, through and threw, its and it's. They are invisible when you read for sense, because the sentence still sounds right in your head.
- Read each line on its own rather than reading the passage for meaning.
- Check three things per line separately: spelling, agreement, punctuation.
- Check all four lines even after you find something — confirming the other three are clean is what makes you sure.