When it comes to Reading questions on the SAT and ACT, nothing induces fear — or at least groans — like inference questions. Some of this reaction is undoubtedly due to the fact that they often seem so fuzzy. Part of the problem, I suspect,  stems from the fact that when people talk about inferences, they’re not always talking about the same thing.

One type of inference is more based on formal logic — that is, it involves the types of conclusions that can be drawn from various premises, and whether those conclusions can be considered valid.

One classic type of this sort of reasoning is the syllogism:

All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

This general type of reasoning may occasionally be required on the SAT or ACT, but it it isn’t really the major focus of these tests.

A second kind of inference, however, is a central to the act of reading: these types of inferences involve “reading between the lines” in order to understand the implications of what an author does not directly state.

While these types of inferences vary dramatically in terms of sophistication, comprehension is effectively impossible without them for the simple reason that no author ever spells out the full reasoning behind every single statement. A certain level of background knowledge and understanding on the part of the reader must be taken for granted — otherwise, there would be no room to discuss anything else! That is why teaching “inferencing” strategies is of limited value: without specific knowledge, there is sometimes no way to make the necessary leap.

For example, consider the following passage:

This text is written in a relatively clear and straightforward style, but it nevertheless requires a fair amount of unspoken background knowledge to be understood. It assumes, for example, that the reader knows what “industrialized” and “nonindustrialized” countries are, and how they differ; that English is an example of a language spoken by people in industrialized countries; and that Papua New Guinea and Amazonian Bolivia are are examples of places that are not industrialized.

If any of these pieces of background knowledge is missing, readers may have difficulty making literal sense out of the passage. They may wonder, for example, why the passage jumps from discussing colors in the first sentence to talking about industrialized vs. nonindustrialized countries in the second; or what English, Berinmo, and Tsimane have to do with those types of countries. They might not even know that Papua New Guinea and Bolivia are countries at all. So even within these couple of sentences, there are numerous possibilities for confusion.

This is what inference questions on the SAT and ACT are essentially designed to gauge: whether you can fill in unspoken gaps in the text well enough to understand what it is literally saying, or to identify a simple piece of underlying logic well enough to draw a conclusion that the author doesn’t bother to state directly.

That is why most correct answers to inference questions do nothing more than rephrase the literal content of the passage from a slightly different angle. The language might be very different, but the idea will be the same. You don’t have to make a leap — it’s more like a step. Or, in some cases, you just have to turn around and face the other way.

For example, a question accompanying the passage above could read something like this:

At first glance, these answers might appear to be — to put it elegantly — a bunch of gobbledygook.

But if you get the gist (that is, the point) of the passage, the question is actually a lot simper than it seems.

It’s phrased in a fairly complicated way, though, so the first thing we want to do is break it down and rephrase it in a simpler way: basically, how are languages in industrialized cultures different from ones in nonindustrialized cultures?

Now, what does the passage literally state about that difference? Nonindustrialized cultures typically have far fewer words for colors than industrialized cultures.

If we write this statement the other way around, we get: industrialized cultures typically have far more words for colors than nonindustrialized cultures. 

Or, in other words, industrialized cultures have richer vocabularies for describing colors. That makes the answer B). Note the second meaning of “rich,” by the way. Note also that when you work like this, the other answers become irrelevant.

So, to sum up, when you encounter an inference question, start by reiterating what the passage literally says. Be on the lookout for concepts with straightforward opposites, e.g., more, less, better, worse, etc. (ACT inference questions tend to be based on them a bit more frequently than SAT inference questions, but they’re certainly fair game for the SAT as well.) Take a second and see if you can tease out the assumption on which the statement is based — and if you think it’s too obvious, there’s a good chance it’s just what you’re looking for.