About this video
An instructor walks through a reading comprehension question asking which factor the passage explicitly gives as the cause of the decline in the price of clean strong wool. The passage names competition from synthetic materials. The instructor models a strategy of finding the answer in the passage and predicting it before reading the choices, then eliminating the distractors that mention real but non-causal details.
You'll be able to
- identify when a question asks for an explicitly stated detail from a passage
- predict an answer from the passage before reading the answer choices
- explain why a real but non-causal detail in a passage is a wrong answer
Key words
- Explicit detail
- A piece of information the passage states directly, so the correct answer can be found in its wording.
- Strong wool
- A type of wool, used in this passage, whose price is driven down by competition from synthetic materials.
- Synthetic material
- A human-made fibre that competes with natural wool in the market.
- Distractor
- A wrong answer choice that sounds reasonable or mentions something real but does not answer the question.
Transcript
- [Instructor] Which one of the following is given in the passage as the cause of the decline in the price of clean strong wool? So this question is a question that asks us to tell them exactly what is explicitly in the passage. The right answer is going to be in here someplace very specific.
So let's scroll up and see if we can find it. I think it was in the first paragraph you know, the decline in the price of clean strong wool that was part of the setup to understand that profitability was down and that the wool industry in New Zealand is in trouble so let's go see if we can find the answer to that.
I'm going to first head towards the first paragraph. Okay there's strong wool. Strong wool shows up here, the price of clean strong wool here so our answer is going to be around here somewhere okay but for the past 20 years competition from synthetics has inexorably driven down the price of clean strong wool.
So here's what we're looking for. We're looking for competition from synthetics so let's go down and find it. A farmers' switching their land to other uses, no. Market competition from synthetic materials, yes. Let's look at the others. Market competition from Australian wool growers.
That was mentioned but that wasn't specifically the cause of the decline in the price of clean strong wool. C sounds good but it's not what we just found. D competition from cotton growers for available land, no they're not competing with cotton growers for the same land.
E the deep division in the wool industry between large and small farms so that wouldn't have driven down the price of wool so that's not right either. It's important to remember with questions like this that we should get an idea of the answer in our heads before we look at the choices at all because if you just start reading the choices a couple of them might wind up looking really good and then you wind up going back and trying to see whether each one of those choices could be right.
You're giving each of those choices the benefit of the doubt when they don't necessarily deserve the benefit of your doubt so you're going to save a lot of time by finding the answer to the question first and then looking at the choices and matching the answer choice to the idea that you've predicted as the answer and that's what we're going here.
The answer here is B.
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