Reasoning Within the Text: Basic Overview

00:01 Foundations of comprehension dove into the fundamental building blocks that make up a car's passage.

00:07 Reasoning within the text, now, gets into the exciting stuff.

00:11 This is where we start to make connections, to compare one part of a passage to another, and to really get an idea of how a passage is stitched together.

00:22 Let's start with a basic overview for what reasoning within the text questions are.

00:28 How they might differ from foundations of comprehension questions and some specifics about how the questions of this type are structured.

00:38 How they can draw out different perspectives from the same piece of data within the car's passage.

00:44 Reasoning within the text questions at this level ask you to evaluate the integrity of a car's passage.

00:53 Does it fit together into a cohesive whole? Do individual aspects connect well logically? Is the end result a work of art or a scattered presentation of different ideas? In many ways, these questions challenge the assumptions that we have held for foundations of comprehension questions.

01:14 Well, we just assumed that the passage was a cohesive whole and we're simply evaluating the individual aspects.

01:22 Reasoning within the text questions test the idea of synergy that a whole should ideally be greater than the sum of its parts.

01:31 Foundations of comprehension questions ask us to evaluate meaning and intent from the immediate sentence context.

01:42 Reasoning within the text questions ask you to compare and contrast claims, perhaps, multiple paragraphs away.

01:50 A type of reasoning within text question can also ask you to relate an individual claim within a passage to that overall purpose or main idea.

02:02 This is one of the many reasons I suggest you to use the first one or two questions of a car's passage to really ground yourself solidly in the main idea before moving forward.

02:13 Remember, a lot of questions require you to understand the main idea even if they don't directly test it? If foundations of comprehension questions are specific and straight to the point, reasoning within the text questions require a more generalized and connected approach.

02:30 This is the same skillset we use to evaluate direct main idea or thesis questions but applied to a subset of the passage.

02:39 You can see why reasoning within the text questions are uniquely matched to be paired with how individual passage elements fit into the overall purpose.

02:49 It's as crucial as ever within these question types to follow the train of thought that the question stem presents and not to insert your own opinion or directionality, a point we will continue to reinforce.

03:04 To illustrate this, let's look at the same claim and then, evaluate it in three different ways based on the criteria that could theoretically be provided by a question stem.

03:14 The statement is really quite simple. Grass is green.

03:17 A reasoning within the text question might ask you, evaluate this from another portion of the passage where a color analyst was discussed.

03:28 A color analyst will focus on the specific hue of the grass, perhaps, the pigments that give it its color.

03:35 They would try to compare its color to a palette that they were already familiar with.

03:41 Same statement, grass is green.

03:45 How about comparing this to a perspective of a biologist that was discussed in the passage? The biologist might point out that the capacity to distinguish different shades of green is an adaptive property.

03:57 Does this shade of green indicate if the plant is edible? Lastly, grass is green.

04:06 And the question stem asks you to evaluate this from the perspective of a psychoanalyst who was discussed in the passage.

04:14 This psychoanalyst will probably ask why a person who stated such an obvious fact would have done so.

04:21 Does the color green signify an underlying emotional attachment? In contrast to the color analyst, the psychoanalyst will probably try to gloss over the specific hue of the grass and instead, focus on the general concept of the color green.

04:37 Likewise, go as general or as specific into the evaluation of a reasoning within the text question as the questions ask you to do so.