Reading
Match each statement to a person, a place, a study or a category. How to handle the list, and the distractors inside it.
Matching features gives you a list of options, often researchers, countries, theories or time periods, and asks you to match statements to them. The list is usually short and the statements are usually numerous.
The trap is that the names are easy to find in the passage, so candidates locate the name and stop reading. What the passage says about that name is the actual question.
What is being tested
Four features of this question type.
Proper nouns stand out on the page. Finding them is not the skill being tested, and taking the first mention you see is the commonest error.
Check the instruction. Where letters can repeat, counting statements against options tells you nothing.
Extra options exist to catch candidates who work by elimination alone.
Passages using this type frequently set researchers against each other. The passage may say that one disagreed with another, and that sentence is the answer to a statement about the second person.
Method
Six steps that keep you out of the distractors.
Go through once and mark where each name appears, including second and third mentions. This is the only reading of the passage you need.
A researcher named in paragraph B is often discussed again in paragraph F. The answer is as likely to be in the later mention.
The view attributed to a person often sits in the sentence before or after their name, especially where a passage is contrasting views.
He, she, they, the latter and this team all carry an attribution forward. The name may be a full sentence away from the claim.
Statements containing a strong claim, a criticism or a reversal are usually the easiest to attribute, because passages signpost disagreement clearly.
A shared word between statement and passage is a matching features distractor almost every time. Check that the meaning matches, not the vocabulary.
Sometimes. The instruction tells you, and where it allows repeats you should expect at least one.
No. Matching features answers do not follow the order of the passage.
Matching features attributes a statement to a named option such as a person or place. Matching information asks which paragraph a detail appears in.
Usually because the answer is at a later mention, or because a reference word carried the attribution forward. Read around each name rather than stopping at the first one.
Read it once to mark where each option appears. That is enough, and it makes every statement faster to place.
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