This hint goes hand in hand with the last one. In fact, this hint provides a method to stop yourself from speeding through the test carelessly. Imagine the hasty student who read the last example question too quickly and thought that the sodium concentration was higher inside the cell than outside. The hasty student, of course, doesn’t realize this error and looks through the answers. And there sits choice A, which is the right answer based on the information lodged in the hasty test taker’s head. So the hasty test taker answers A and continues on her way, having lost points she should have gotten.

But if the hasty test taker had instead tried to answer the question without looking at the answers, she wouldn’t have been so hasty. Instead, she would have had to stop for a second and look at the information in the question a second time; then she would have sorted everything out and gotten the question right. If you force yourself to answer the question before looking at the answer choices, you force yourself to come to grips with the question and therefore will cut down on the careless errors you might normally make.