Back to Tutorials
4 real questions, Test 1 — 2 Main Idea, then both real Inference examples
Main Idea/Purpose questions show up regularly; Inference is genuinely rare here — honestly, worth knowing before you expect it constantly. 4 real questions, including both of Test 1’s real Inference examples.
Q31 — Main Purpose of a daily-life text
Q31: “What is the main purpose of this email?”
The email announces IT “will be performing scheduled maintenance… this Saturday.” The correct option captures that overall purpose — the other three each grab one wrong detail: a permanent change, a request to stop using something permanently, or an apology for something that already happened.
Answer: To inform staff of scheduled weekend Wi-Fi maintenance.
Q36 — Main Topic of an academic passage
Q36: “What is the main topic of the passage?”
The passage traces rice from its domestication in the Yangtze valley through its later spread. The correct answer captures that whole arc; the wrong options each latch onto one narrower detail — nutrition, modern farming, a dispute about trade routes — that the passage only touches in passing, if at all.
Answer: The domestication process and spread of cultivated rice.
Q38 — a real Inference: what the passage implies but never states
Q38: “What can be inferred about early farmers’ role in the domestication process?”
The passage says farmers “unconsciously favored plants with the non-shattering trait simply by harvesting and replanting from the most convenient specimens each season.” It never says outright “this wasn’t a deliberate plan” — but “unconsciously” and “simply by…each season” together imply exactly that: gradual, not planned.
Answer: They gradually favored the non-shattering trait without a single deliberate plan.
Q43 — a second real Inference, a step of logic beyond the stated fact
Q43: “What can be inferred about planes hit in the areas with the fewest observed hits?”
The passage states planes struck in those areas “had evidently failed to return at all.” The question asks you to draw the one small step of logic that follows: if a plane got hit there and never came back, that area was more dangerous, not safer — the opposite of what the raw damage pattern on surviving planes suggested.
Answer: Aircraft hit there were less likely to survive and return at all.
DEB
4 things to know about Main Idea and Inference here