About this video
A walkthrough of a reading-comprehension question that asks which item is mentioned in passage B but not in passage A. The video shows how to use process of elimination and a word search across the passages, checking candidate words such as punishment, rewards, legal systems and human limitations, and concludes that the answer is trials.
You'll be able to
- read a question that asks what appears in one passage but not another.
- use process of elimination to rule out answer choices efficiently.
- decide when a question is worth returning to later when time is short.
Key words
- Process of elimination
- Ruling out answer choices that are clearly wrong until one remains.
- Treasure hunt
- Searching a passage for specific words or ideas to confirm or rule out a choice.
- Memory question
- A question that depends on what you recall from reading, backed up by checking the text.
Transcript
- [Narrator] Which one of the following is mentioned in passage B, but not in passage A? Okay, so this is a question that requires you to have a good recollection of what was in the passage. In a way, it's kind of a memory quiz, and what we can do here is see what we remember, and then go back and hunt for evidence to support our answer with the remaining things.
So we should try to use process of elimination as best we can before going and spending time working through the passage looking for ways to cross out bad answers. So let's look at what we have here. So one way to approach this would be to do this for each choice.
Is punishment mentioned in A? I don't know, we can check it out. I'm pretty sure it's mentioned in B, so, because we talk about the punishment and how it should be mitigated or not, based on the traumatic childhood of a defendant. So, we can going back and look for punishment in A.
Trials, do passage A talk about trials? Mmm, not sure, so I'll put a little question mark here, and it definitely is mentioned in B. Trials are mentioned in B. C, rewards, does passage A mention rewards? We can go look for that. And when we go back and look for it, we're actually going to be scanning the passage for these words, so the word "trial", the word "punishment", the words "legal systems", the words "human limitations".
And that's another good strategy to use when you're trying to quickly find information you need. D, does passage A mention legal systems? We can go find that out. The way we're going to find that out, again, is to be looking for these two words in passage A. Does passage B mention legal systems?
Maybe you remember, maybe you don't. I'll leave it as a question mark. E, human limitations, does passage A mention human limitations? Let's go back and see. One thing to think about with these questions is they do take a little longer than some of the other questions, because it does require some searching, some treasure hunting in order to rule out your choices.
This may be a question, if you're running short on time, questions like this, that clearly might take longer, might be candidates for waiting until the end of the passage to come back and do this if you have time. So, with that in mind, let's head up and see whether we can find any of these things in passage A.
Because if we can find them in passage A, then we can cross out that choice. Punishments, trials, rewards, legal systems, human limitations, let's go. (scrolling on computer page) Okay, here we go, we're looking for trials, punishments, rewards, human legal systems, let's see what we got.
Okay, here's rewards, there's punishments in passage A. Human limitations in passage A. Let's keep on going, read. What else are we looking for here? We're looking for legal systems, legal systems, legal systems, legal ... There it is, legal systems. Okay, so we found four of those choices in passage A, so let's go, trials, trials, there's trial.
Okay, so we've done a word find here, and we've been able to cross out punishment, rewards, legal systems, and human limitations, because those are all in A. Those are in A, these were all in A, and the question it's asking, which one of the following is mentioned in passage B, but not in passage A, so our answer must be trials.
And we did find trials on our own in passage B.
Video © Khan Academy, used under CC BY-NC-SA. Watch on Khan Academy. Puzzicle is not affiliated with Khan Academy.