Referent Questions
As the name suggest, these questions involve your ability to connect the referent pronoun to another word, clause, or phrase. For example: Bob’s face always goes red when he is angry. “Bob” is referred to by “he” later in the sentence. There will be at most 2 referent questions on each passage, but some may not even have any.
How to deal:
1. Know your grammar! Get yourself familiar with pronouns and adjective clauses. Remember: “it” refers to an animal, thing or place - not a person. “They” can refer to people, animals, places, or things, and is always plural. Other referents include “he” “she” “we” “them”.
2. Once you have located the referent, read the surrounding sentences carefully to find what the word is referring to. Pay special attention to the context surround the sentence your referent is in, specially the sentence directly before, you may find the antecedent in them.
3. Recognize that the antecedent will only appear after the referent in very specific cases - when the sentence begins with an adverb clause. In these cases the referent and antecedent are almost always in the same sentence - a second independent clause. These sentences look like this: adverb clause which includes the referent*,* independent clause which includes the antecedent. For example: Once he arrived at the school, Billy went directly to the Principal’s office.
4. Pay attention to things like number, gender, and category (ie, person or thing) to help you rule out answers. For example, if the referent is “it” we know it must be singular, and a thing - not a person.
5. After eliminating as many options as possible, replace the referent with each remaining option and read them to yourself. Do they make sense in that context?
Watch out for:
* Wrong answers that fit all of the characteristics, but makes no sense in the context.
* Wrong answers that seem like the “best” option yet don’t fit the grammatical structure of the sentence.
Types of questions you can except.
1) Fact/Detail Questions
2) Not/Except Questions
3) Referent Questions
4) Vocabulary Questions
5) Inference Questions
6) Rhetorical Structure Questions
7) Coherence Questions
8) Paraphrasing Questions
9) Table Completion Questions
10) Prose Summary Questions
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[...] Fact/Detail Questions 2) Not/Except Questions 3) Referent Questions 4) Vocabulary Questions 5) Inference Questions 6) Rhetorical Structure Questions 7) Coherence [...]
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