The Ultimate Guide to SAT Inference Questions: Tips for Solving the Hardest Problems

Inferences are one of the hardest questions in the verbal section of the digital SAT.

This is because, unlike most reading questions, Inference questions require you to do some logical thinking (the only other exception is Command of Evidence).

Specifically, these questions are designed to assess your ability to analyze and interpret information effectively, making logical inferences, and identifying claims and supporting evidence.

These skills are also known as Critical reading.

Mastering these skills will not only boost your SAT scores but also equip you with essential critical reading abilities for higher education and real-life scenarios.

In this post, I will show you the exact strategies I took to master this section of the SAT.

What are Inference Questions in the Digital SAT?

Inference questions consist of a passage providing various information about a topic. The passage is unfinished: there is a blank at the end.

Your job is to use the information in the passage and find the statement that most logically completes the text.

Sat Inference Questions Example

An Inference question looks something like this:

Since the SAT is adaptive, module 2 will be way harder if you did great in module 1. As a result, an Inference question there will look a bit scarier. Something like this:

P/S: These questions are taken from DSAT16, a free SAT prep platform I made. If you want more questions like them, please check them out!

How Many Inference Questions are there in an SAT Test?

There are no official number of inference questions in an SAT test.

However, based on past digital SAT tests as well as Bluebook practice tests, I can say that there are 1-3 Inference questions per module on average.

That’s 2-6 questions per test.

These questions will be placed right in the middle of the module (i.e. right before the writing section).

One Tip for Inference Questions: Skip It

When I studied for the SAT in 2023, I immediately dived into Information and Ideas questions.

These are the only questions that require logical thinking. Since, I was good at that, those questions felt interesting to dissect.

After a few weeks of studying, I succeeded.

However, my score only improved by 30 points.

That’s a decent jump, but not good enough for over a month of studying.

After doing some research to implement the grading function for DSAT16’s full-length practice test, I found out why.

Under the hood, the digital SAT uses Item response theory (IRT) to score the test.

Instead of simply counting the number of correct answers, IRT evaluates each question based on its difficulty (along with a few other factors) and assign a score to that question.

Counterintuitively, harder questions worth less points than easier ones.

For example, if you answer a hard question correctly, you will only get maybe 10 points, whereas you would get 30 points if you get an easy question right.

Aside from the IRT theory model, Applerouth also analyzed the digital SAT test and found that the questions with the greatest weighting are easy questions and Student-Produced Responses (in Math modules).

Since Inferences (or Information and Idea questions in general) are among the hardest questions, they don’t contribute to your score as much.

What should you do with this information?

Unless you are aiming for a 700+ Verbal, you are better off skipping these questions (after randomly guess (D) of course).

Use those precious time to do other questions, or even double check the easier ones.

But if you are aiming for that 800 Verbal, you must know how to make an inference.

How to Answer Inference Questions

The RAPLE method

Like with almost any other Reading questions, you should follow this 5-step framework:

1. Read the question.
2. Read the passage.
3. Summarize the key information (rephrase it in your own words if necessary).
4. Predict the answer by making various inferences from the given information.
5. Check the answer and select the one that matches.

Step 1 is super easy for Inference questions.

the question is always the same, so it should only take you half a second to know that it is indeed an Inference question.

The other steps are quite tricky. We’ll go deeper into the whole process in a second. However, notice how we are already making an inference before looking at the answer choices.

When you look at the answer choices first, your brain gets influenced by what's written there.

You start second-guessing yourself.

But when you predict the answer beforehand, you know exactly what you're looking for.

If an answer choice matches your prediction almost perfectly, you can confidently select it and move on. If it does not, you can confidently cross it out.

This strategy can genuinely save you 30-60 seconds of second-guessing yourself.

Making an Inference

In mathematics, an inference would look something like this:

In the digital SAT, however, things will not be that comfortable for you.

Let’s look at a passage taken from Bluebook:

Unlike the structured language of mathematics, here, the passage is dreadfully long, and the key information is spread across sentences.

Our goal, hence, is to compress these passages down to math-like expressions:

But, how do I actually do this?

Let’s start with a simpler example:

First, let's try to summarize the main points of this passage, using as few characters as possible.

The key is to rely on contextual clues in the passage. Here’s one way to achieve this:

Next, let’s try to deduce more information out of this.

The passage states that “most people still prefer paper over e-book”.

Hence, one information we can conclude from the text is that e-book is a less popular choice compared to paper (e-book < paper).

Moreover, since “attitudes are changing”, we can infer that paper used to be way more popular than e-book, or in the future, the gap between the two will decrease.

These are quite intuitive. As straightforward as they might seem, the actual test will only require you to make inferences similar to them.

However, be careful of unconsciously making speculations. Wrong answers often refer to information that appears in the passage and could be true, but there isn’t enough information to know that they are absolutely true.

For example, in this case, we cannot conclude that people will prefer e-book over paper in the future, as there isn’t enough information in the passage to know if it is true or not.

Let’s look at another example:

Again, let’s extract the key points from this text.

The passage states that natural light has a positive impact on employees.

One information we can reason out immediately is that employees who are not provided with enough natural light are less happy, healthy, and productive and those who do.

Moreover, since older buildings were not designed with this study in mind, we can also infer that employees working in older buildings are not provided with sufficient natural light.

Here’s the shorter version, written by an employee working in an older building.

To summarize, we can conclude that employees working in older buildings are less happy, less healthy, and less productive than those who work in new buildings.

Let’s try a test-style passage next.

Again, let’s extract the meat and bones from this passage. Here’s a summary written by a caveman.

Despite being twice as long as the previous ones, this one is actually quite straightforward.

From this information, we can infer that the fat probably wasn't used for its preservative attribute, or that fat was only used to bind pigments.

Use scratch paper

When I was prepping for the SAT, I constantly faced this one problem.

I always have to go back and forth between the answer choices and the passage.

No matter how hard I used 100% of my brain and try to keep the passage in mind, I always seemed to forget everything when I read the answer choices.

Well, turns out, our brain is not built for that.

Our working memory can only hold about 3-4 pieces of information at once.

That’s barely enough for the passage. Let alone the answer choices and all the brainstorm we have to do to make sense of them.

That’s why I (and a lot of you) had to reread the passage every 5 seconds.

I don’t need to tell you why reading the passage more than once is suboptimal. The most optimal strategy will only require you to read it once.

Writing everything down on a piece of paper helps with this.

When you write down your compressed version of the passage, you free up your working memory.

You can focus on analyzing the answer choices without constantly rereading the passage. Instead, you now only have to reread the condensed version you have already written.

This makes the process linear. No more rereading.

Practice with SAT Inference Questions Examples

Let’s follow the principle and summarize the key information.

With predictive policing: 19% decrease

Without predictive policing: ~19% decrease

From this, we can determine that predictive policing has nothing to do with the decline itself, which is what (D) says.

To use process of elimination:

• (A) is wrong because there is no mentioning of local factors in the passage,
• (B) directly contradicts the information before it,
• and (C) is incorrect because we have established that predictive policing has nothing to do with crime rate. Furthermore, the wording is too extreme and subjective to be correct.

Pay attention to extreme words like “all”, “none”, “always”, “never”, “only”,... Answer choices that contain these words are usually incorrect (in some rare instances, they might be correct though so you still need to be careful).

Again, let’s approach this question methodically:

From here we can infer that the answer must talk about the difference between these experiments.

This leads us directly to (B), which states that the connection between appearance and personality differs from one method to another.

To use process of elimination:

• (A) can be eliminated directly because there is no information that supports this claim. The text is too objective for it to be correct.
• The same goes for (D). In fact, the passage actually suggests that there is a link between appearance and personality traits, specifically extroversion and conscientiousness.
• Be careful with (C). While the choice initially seems correct, there’s not enough information to determine if it’s 100% true or not.

Conclusion

Hopefully, with this guide, you can know ace Inference questions without overloading your brain.

This blog is part of a SAT Guide series. If you liked this one, you probably don't want to miss the next few.

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