Detail questions usually require you to locate what?

• A. The author’s overall purpose.
• B. A sentence that mentions a detail.
• C. A synonym of a highlighted word.
• D. The final concluding sentence.

Answer: (B)

Detail questions target specific facts stated in the text. When you see a prompt about a particular fact, your job is to find the sentence in the passage that directly mentions that fact. That sentence serves as the exact source for the answer, so you can be confident you’re using explicit information rather than guessing from the overall meaning. To do this, identify the detail in the question, scan for where the passage mentions that detail, and read the surrounding context to confirm it’s the precise fact asked about.

This approach works well because other types of questions focus on different things. Questions about the author’s purpose look for why the writer wrote the piece, not a specific fact. The final concluding sentence is about how the passage ends, not about a single detail. A vocabulary question asks for a synonym of a word, not a fact from the text.