Critical Reading - Reading Comprehension/Analysis
The critical reading section of the SAT includes 48 questions related to reading comprehension. The reading comprehension/analysis questions included in this section are designed to evaluate an individual's ability to understand the relationship between key concepts in a passage, the individual's ability to understand the passage itself, or the individual's ability to extract an idea from context.
Each of these questions presents a passage of approximately 150 - 850 words that describes information related to topics such as biology, chemistry, earth science, history, literature, politics, and a variety of other topics. The exam-taker must read the passage and use the information from the passage to answer questions associated with the passage.
For example, if a question asked you to read the above paragraph, it might also ask you to identify the main topic of the passage. The choices provided might be:
- General Academic Topics
- Sentence Completion Questions on the SAT
- Reading Comprehension Questions on the SAT
- Mathematics Section of the SAT
- Natural Sciences
The answer for this example would be (C), as the passage describes the Reading Comprehension Questions on the SAT. The reading-comprehension questions on the SAT will be presented in a similar format to this example, but the exam-taker may be required to identify or analyze topics or facts that are more subtle than those presented here.