Academic English Skills with Dr. Byrnes

  Today we’re focusing on one of the toughest question types on the TOEFL Reading section—inference questions.  Why are they tough? Because inference questions ask you to find information that’s not directly mentioned in the passage. To handle them, you need a special tool called logic. If you have the right tools, inference questions can actually become the easiest questions, because the answer you find will follow with 100 percent certainty. Without the tools, well… it can feel like guesswork. Let’s take an example to see how logic works in action. Question The periodic table is a chart that reflects the periodic recurrence of chemical and physical properties of the elements. Work has shown that in a periodic table, elements should not be ordered strictly by atomic mass. For example, tellurium comes before iodine in the periodic table, even though its atomic mass is slightly greater. Such anomalies are due to the relative abundance of the “isotopes” or varieties of each ele...