7 Traps on GRE Flashcards
How many types of answer choices are trap answers?
Seven
What is the first trap answer type?
Answer choices that use extreme or categorical words such as “Only, all, always, every, never, exclusively.”
“According to the author, ALL women in East Africa suffer from the viral fever.”
What is the second trap answer type?
Answer choices that make use of information that doesn’t appear in the text.
“According to the author, women in West Africa suffer from the viral fever due to heredity.”
What is the third trap answer type?
Answer choice in which facts are distorted.
“According to the author, women in East Africa suffered from the viral fever last year, because of the civil war.”
What is the fourth trap answer type?
Answer choices that ask you to make judgments. Passages on the GRE never ask the reader to judge anything, and the judgment will have already been made by the author.
“Women in East Africa are more easily prone to suffer from the viral fever than men. (asks you to make a comparison/judgment without sufficient proof).”
What is the fifth trap answer type?
Answer choices that include outrageous, illogical, unscientific, or politically incorrect statements.
“According to the author, women in East Africa suffer from the viral fever because they are allowed to socialize. (outrageous statement)”
What is the sixth trap answer type?
Answer choices that are true, but assume something that is not mentioned in the passage.
“Pregnant women in East Africa are prone to the viral fever, because they probably don’t exercise much. (an assumption has been made)”
What is the seventh trap answer type?
Answer choices that cannot be backed by solid proof from within the passage.
“According to a survey, women in East Africa suffer from the viral fever more often than women in West Africa. (no solid proof, or details of the survey)”
