Question 1
Which one of the following most accurately expresses the main point of the passage?
Reading Comprehension, explained
One scored section has four sets of questions. Each set is a passage, or a pair of shorter passages, followed by five to eight questions.
| Scored sections | One, 35 minutes |
|---|---|
| Sets | Four, each with five to eight questions |
| Comparative reading | One pair of passages, or none |
| Pace | About 8 to 9 minutes a set |
What the questions ask
- The main idea or primary purpose
- What a passage states, and what it implies
- What a word or phrase means in context
- How the passage is organized and why a detail is there
- The author's attitude
- How the ideas apply to a new case, or how new information would affect them
Read for structure
Before the questions, know four things: the topic, the author's main point, the views the author reports, and where the author turns against one of them. Most questions can then be answered by going back to one or two sentences.
Try 3 questions
Counting trees
City governments that want to cool their streets have embraced tree planting with enthusiasm, and many now announce targets in round numbers: a million trees in a decade, or one new tree for every resident. The appeal of such targets is obvious. A count is easy to report and easy to verify, and every tree planted can be photographed. Yet the number of trees a city plants is a poor guide to how much cooler its streets will become.
Trees cool their surroundings in two main ways. They cast shade, which keeps sunlight from heating pavement, walls and people, and they release water vapor through their leaves, a process that draws heat from the surrounding air. Both effects depend far more on the size of a tree's canopy than on the mere existence of the tree. A sapling planted this spring will provide almost none of either for years, and in many cities a large share of street saplings die before they reach maturity, often because no one waters them through their first few summers.
Placement matters as well. A tree in a park that is already shaded by older trees adds little, while the same tree beside a bus stop on a treeless avenue may change how hundreds of people experience a hot afternoon. But treeless avenues are often treeless for a reason: narrow sidewalks, buried utility lines and soil compacted by decades of traffic make planting there slow and expensive. A program judged by its count will tend to drift toward the easy sites, where trees can be planted quickly and cheaply, and away from the hard ones, where they are most needed.
None of this is an argument against planting. It is an argument for measuring something else. Some cities have begun to set targets for canopy cover, the share of ground shaded by tree crowns as seen from above, and to track it separately for each neighborhood. Canopy targets reward keeping existing large trees alive, which a planting count ignores entirely, and they make it plain when the hottest neighborhoods are being left behind. They are harder to measure and slower to move than a count, and they make for less exciting announcements. That is precisely their virtue: they register only the shade that residents can actually stand in.
Question 2
According to the passage, trees cool their surroundings by
Question 3
The passage suggests that a planting program judged by its count would most likely
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Questions people ask
What is comparative reading?
Two shorter passages on a related topic, with questions about each one and about how they relate, for example a general claim and an example of it, or a point and a counterpoint.
Do I need to know about the topics in advance?
No. Every answer comes from the passages. Outside knowledge can mislead you if the passage says something different.