When a question has no citation, very little actually changes in our approach to it. The answer to the question is still going to be spelled out somewhere in the passage, but now it might be anywhere in the passage, rather than being localized to a few lines.
Let me say that again: even though there’s no specific citation, the answer is still going to be spelled out somewhere. You should NOT try to answer a question like this by making a broad inference from the overall passage that isn’t directly supported by actual phrases from the text.
The only challenging thing that separates a question like this from a question with a citation is that it can sometimes be harder to locate the part of the text with the answer.
If the text is very short, we can probably just go ahead and read the whole thing without too much difficulty. If the text is longer, I’d recommend saving any general questions for the end—in other words, I would skip around and do all the citation questions first, then come back and pick up the more general questions. I do this because answering the citation questions will typically cause me to go back through most of the text, and I’ll often find that the answers to general, non-citation questions are right there in the citations for other questions. So I can save some time and energy by doing the citation questions first.
Even if answering the citation questions doesn’t actually cause me to read the part of the text that contains the answer to a general question, I can still save a little time because I don’t need to re-read or skim those areas of the text when I go back to find the answers.
Again, the critical thing to remember with general passage questions is that the answer is always clearly spelled out in black and white somewhere within the passage, even though the question lacks a citation. There is literally never a moment on a real SAT in which the only way to answer a question is to draw a general inference from the overall ‘feeling’ of the text. If there were any questions that required those kinds of inferences, the reliability of the SAT would disappear.
What About “Tone, Mood, And Attitude” Questions?
Sometimes the College Board asks you about the tone or the mood of a passage, or about the author’s attitude, or about how the passage might best be characterized, and so on. Test-takers are usually very tempted to try to answer these kinds of questions in the same ways they would tend to answer them in a literature class: they usually just read the passage and make a subjective assessment of how it makes them feel, and then look for an answer choice that describes their subjective feelings.
But, as we have mentioned repeatedly, the SAT would not be a valid, reliable standardized test if it relied on subjectivity and inference.
So even for the “tone, mood, and attitude” questions, the correct answer is going to be spelled out somewhere in the text. For example, if the correct answer is that a particular quotation is “nostalgic,” then the passage would need to say something like “Tom kept thinking about the happy days of his past, and longing for them to return,” because that would reflect the definition of the term “nostalgic.” If the correct answer is going to be something like “enthusiastic,” then the text would need to say something like “Everybody was very excited for the project to begin, and couldn’t wait to enjoy the results,” because that’s what “enthusiastic” means.
So when you answer these kinds of questions, you’re still just going to be looking through the text very carefully to match phrases in the text with one of the answer choices—just like you do for all of the Passage-Based Reading questions, basically.
What About “Similar Situation” Questions?
Some questions ask you to choose the answer choice that describes a situation that is similar to a situation described in the text. These are the only Passage-Based Reading questions on the test that can really be said not to involve direct paraphrasing, in the strictest sense of that term, because the correct answer will typically mention concepts that aren’t in the passage.
But these questions still shouldn’t be too difficult to answer if you stick very, very closely to the concepts in the text, and find an answer choice that demonstrates the same relationships among the concepts it includes. So we’re still going to be reading the text very carefully, and we’re still going to be reading the answer choices very carefully, and we’re still going to be looking for the answer choice that echoes the text.
For instance, imagine that the text says, “Steven was surprised to discover that Lauren had never learned to throw a baseball, since she was so athletic in general,” and the question asks us to pick the answer choice that describes a similar situation. The correct answer might say something like “a woman is stunned when she finds out that her friend, who is a great musician, has never learned to play the piano.” In this hypothetical scenario, both the text and the correct answer would describe someone being surprised to find out that another person has a lot of talent in a particular field but has never learned a particular skill within that field.