Critical Reading Questions with Impliance

tokenadult
Tue, 06 Nov 2007 20:41:55 +0000

I know infers is what you MUST get from the text, but the implies confuses me.



I infer that your parents may speak a language other than English at home. That you don’t have the kind of native speaker of General American English background that I have is implied by your use of the word “impliance,” which I don’t think you will find in any English dictionary, in the thread title.

To infer is to do what a reader or listener does: to make a conclusion from information read or heard. To imply is to do what a writer or speaker does: to say something indirectly, without saying in exact words what is implied. A reading passage on the SAT will imply something that you can REASONABLY guess (that is, infer) from the whole context of the passage as it appears in your test booklet, especially if you focus on the words specifically mentioned in the test question. You can probably make reasonable inferences about reading passages more at your own reading level in English, and perhaps you can in another language too. SAT reading passages are a little harder than most high school reading, but the process of figuring out what they imply is still the same.