As we’ve emphasized before in this book, knowing the order of difficulty will help determine your overall approach to the test. On the Science Reasoning Test, you can expect to encounter questions roughly in order of increasing difficulty within each passage; however, this order of difficulty does not always hold, and you will sometimes get an easy question at the end of a passage’s section. Still, keep this order of increasing difficulty in mind as you answer the questions.

With this handy piece of knowledge, you’ll know that you should be able to answer the first questions within a section fairly easily. The first questions usually deal with your comprehension of the information presented in the passage. They tend to be Read the Chart questions in Data Representation and Research Summaries passages, and Detail questions in the Conflicting Viewpoints passage. If you cannot answer these questions easily, your understanding of the passage may be fundamentally flawed. In that case, you might want to spend a little time (preferably less than a minute) reviewing the passage to make sure you understand what it means.