To do well on reading comprehension, you must learn to find the proper balance between time spent reading the passage and time spent answering the questions. There’s no use laboring over the passage and making sure you understand everything if you run out of time before getting to the questions. Similarly, there’s no use flying through the passage and understanding nothing, since that will obviously make it difficult to answer the questions.

In the following paragraphs, we will provide some strategies to help you balance your time between reading the passages and answering the questions. These strategies will certainly help, but to put your time and effort to best use, you must also practice and learn how quickly you can read without sacrificing understanding. Some test preparation companies promote the use of speed-reading techniques, but in our opinion, these techniques are dubious and often don’t result in a very good understanding of the material you read.

Knowing that reading comprehension questions will test your understanding of both general and specific information probably makes you think that when you read the passage, you’ll have to spend time focusing on the big themes and the small details. But that’s not really true. A single passage contains one general tone and one general theme, and it will have a particular point. That same passage will have numerous pieces of specific information. At most, you will have to answer 13 questions about a passage, and while those 13 might be able to cover most of the general themes, there’s simply no way they can test all of the specific information. The strategy we propose for ap--proaching reading comprehension passages will minimize wasted time and effort. It will allow you to get a general sense of the passage and a contextual understanding that will make answering questions about specific information that much easier.

In this method, you read the passage first and pay no attention to the questions until after you’ve finished reading. You should read the passage quickly and lightly. Do not dwell on details, but make sure you get a general understanding of what is going on in the passage. Pay active attention to what’s going on, but don’t get bogged down trying to completely assimilate every fact. This doesn’t mean you should ignore the core of every paragraph and focus only on the topic sentence. It means that you should read the passage and see the lay of the land. You should read so that you understand the themes of the passage and the reason the passage was written.

The specific facts are a part of the author’s effort to achieve his or her goals, but as you read, you should be more concerned with the cumulative effect of the specific facts than with the specific facts themselves. The only time you should slow down and go back is if you lose the flow of the passage and end up lost. Read the passage with an awareness of the general questions the SAT might ask you. What is the author’s goal in writing the passage? What are the tone, themes, and major points? When you finish a passage, you should be able to answer these questions and also have a sense of the passage’s structure and of where things lie within it.

When you finish the passage, go to the questions. You should be able to answer general questions without needing to look at the passage. Questions on specific information will indicate the lines in the passage to which they refer. Before going back to the paragraph, articulate to yourself exactly what the question is asking, but don’t look at the answers (this will help you avoid being influenced by “trick” answers). Then go to the specified area in the passage and read a few lines before and after it to get a sense of the context. Come up with your own answer to the question, then go back and find the answer that best matches yours.

Some test-prep courses or books advise you to skim over the questions before reading the passage so you know what to look for. In theory it sounds like a good idea, but in the end we think it will just make your life confusing. Holding 13 questions in your head isn’t easy, and some are bound to get mixed up. Also, to answer the specific questions swarming in your head you would have to concentrate on the small facts of the passage to make sure you don’t miss anything. That concentration is likely to limit your speed, lessen your understanding of the passage as a whole, and perhaps even affect your memory of the questions you skimmed. It’s more effective to take a top-down approach and understand the passage as a whole before trying to fill in the specific blanks, questions by question.

Many students have trouble with reading comprehension passages because they find it hard to maintain focus for the entire passage. To combat the devastating loss-of-focus disease, we’ve provided some practical advice.

If you have a tendency to drift, to suddenly realize that you have read a hundred words but have no idea what they said, you could take a brief moment—and we mean brief—and think about each paragraph once you’ve finished. Think about what the paragraph said, what it was about, and how it fit into the overall passage. By stopping after each paragraph, you give yourself a structure that will help you concentrate and better understand what’s happening in the passage.

Another way to help you focus and remember things when you have to go back to the passage is to underline or circle key arguments, sentences, and facts—anything relating to general themes and ideas, the main idea of each paragraph, or other aspects of the passage that strike you as important. This will reinforce what you read and give you a sort of map for when you go back to the passage to answer specific questions.

Dual passages are exactly what their name implies: two passages that deal with the same subject. Because of the way the passages and the questions that follow them are organized, however, your approach to them should be different.

As you look at the dual passage section, you will first see a single introductory blurb that puts both passages into context. The two passages follow the blurb, one after the other. The two passages might differ in length relative to each other, but together they will take up 80–100 lines. Either 12 or 13 questions accompany the dual passages. As with the questions for single passages, dual-passage questions are organized according to line number. Those questions dealing with passage 1 will therefore be first, followed by the questions asking about passage 2. The last few questions will ask you to relate the two passages.

When you come to the dual passage, read the introductory paragraph and passage 1, using the techniques outlined earlier. After you’ve finished passage 1, go to the questions, starting with the first. Answer the questions that ask about passage 1, skipping and marking for later those that seem as if they’ll take too much time. When you reach the first question about passage 2, go back and read passage two. Ask yourself while you’re reading how this second passage relates to the first. Does it agree? Disagree? Does it do both at different times? Mark places where the second passage seems to intersect most with the first, whether in disagreement or agreement. After reading passage 2, return to the questions and begin answering where you left off. Eventually you’ll reach the questions that relate the two passages. By this point, you’ll not only have read both passages, you’ll also have a better understanding of each because of the questions you’ve already answered.