Part 3: Reading for Information
One passage, four labelled paragraphs, nine paraphrased statements and a fifth option that means the fact is not there at all. The part with no order rule to ride.
A matching grid, not a comprehension test
Part 3 gives you one informational passage of the kind you might meet in a magazine or an encyclopaedia entry, chopped into four paragraphs and labelled A, B, C and D. On the right sit nine statements. For each one you decide which paragraph contains that information. There is a fifth option, E, and it means none of them does.
Nobody asks what the passage means, what the author thinks, or what you can conclude from it. The part asks one question nine times: where is this? You get about nine minutes, so roughly a minute a statement, and the passage is factual rather than argumentative, which makes Part 3 the most comfortable part of the section for most candidates.
That comfort is conditional on doing the part in the right order. Done in the wrong order, the same nine minutes are not nearly enough, and the reason has nothing to do with how hard the passage is.
The statements are paraphrases by construction
The mechanical-sounding task would be mechanical, except that the statements almost never use the paragraph's words. A paragraph saying that seed lies dormant on the bottom through the winter becomes a statement about a bed recovering from a bad season, sharing not one word with its own answer.
This is deliberate and it has two consequences. The first is that keyword matching does not work here, and worse, it actively misleads. A word from the statement very often does appear somewhere in the passage, in the wrong paragraph, put there to collect people who searched for it.
The second consequence is that you have to translate before you search. Read the statement, work out what fact it is actually asking for, and say that fact in your own plain words. A feature of the seed that lets a bed recover from a bad year is asking about seed that survives to the following season. Now you can look for the idea rather than the vocabulary, and the idea is findable.
Candidates who skip the translation step do the part twice: once searching for words that are not there, once properly. There is no room in nine minutes for that.
Map the paragraphs, do not read them
The correct opening move is to give the passage about one minute and come away with four labels rather than four summaries. A is the animal itself. B is how it was hunted. C is the commercial history. D is the threats and what is being done about them. Four short phrases, and that is genuinely all you need.
Building anything more detailed is time you will not get back. You cannot hold four paragraphs of unattached detail in working memory against nine questions you have not read yet, so the detail evaporates and the minute is spent twice.
The map does two jobs. It tells you which paragraph to open first for any given statement, which turns nine searches of a whole passage into nine searches of one paragraph. And it tells you when a statement's topic does not match any of the four labels, which is the first genuine signal that E might be the answer.
One minute is the budget. If mapping is taking two, you are reading rather than labelling, and the rest of the part will pay for it.
Give the passage exactly one minute and come away with four topic labels, not four summaries. The map is an index, not a reading, and building anything richer means reading the passage twice inside nine minutes.
There is no order to ride
This is the biggest structural difference between Part 3 and Part 1, and it catches people who have just come from Part 1 twenty minutes earlier.
The statements do not walk down the passage. A statement about paragraph D can sit above a statement about paragraph A, and two consecutive statements can point at the same paragraph. There is no sequence to lean on, and expecting one is actively harmful.
The failure this produces is subtle. You have answered A, A, B, B, and the next statement smells like C, so you take C without the same scrutiny you gave the first four. That pattern is telling you nothing at all. Answers routinely jump backwards and routinely repeat, and the statement in front of you has to be settled entirely on its own merits.
The practical rule is that every statement gets the same procedure regardless of what came before: translate it, decide which label it belongs under, open that paragraph, find the specific fact or fail to find it. No shortcuts based on position, and no assumption that each paragraph gets its fair share.
Say each statement in your own plain words before you search. The statements are written to avoid the paragraph's vocabulary, so hunting for their actual words finds either nothing or the wrong paragraph.
Earning your E
E means the information in that statement is not in any of the four paragraphs. It is a real answer, not a safety valve, and candidates fail it in both directions with two failures that look nothing alike.
The forced match. The statement asks how many communities run the restoration programmes. Paragraph D is visibly about the restoration programmes. The pull toward D is almost physical, and it is wrong, because the number was never printed. You are matching the subject rather than the fact, and E is sitting there precisely to collect people who do that. E items are usually built exactly this way: topic unmistakably present, specific fact absent.
The bin. A statement resists you, the minute is nearly gone, and E starts to feel like a dignified way to lose. It is not. In a normal set only one of the nine statements is genuinely absent from the passage, so an E chosen out of fatigue is very likely wrong, and it is wrong in a way that also costs you the correct answer you would have found with fifteen more seconds.
The discipline is symmetrical. Search all four paragraphs for the specific fact before you say E, and say E without hesitation once you have. Do not treat E as a quota either: the number of E answers is not fixed, and counting them is not a strategy.
Working the nine minutes
One minute mapping. Then roughly 50 seconds a statement, which leaves a small margin at the end. Take the statements in the order they are given, but with one exception: if a statement resists after about 40 seconds, park it and go on, because a statement whose target you cannot name is a statement you will solve faster after the others have narrowed the field.
That narrowing is real. Each resolved statement teaches you a little more about what is in each paragraph, so the last statement is always cheaper than the first. Leaving the hardest one for last is not procrastination here, it is sequencing.
Two habits pay for themselves in this part. The first is reading the statement twice, because they are short and a misread statement wastes the entire search that follows. The second is checking that the fact you found actually matches the whole statement rather than most of it. Part 3 statements often contain two conditions, and a paragraph carrying one of them without the other is the second most common trap after the forced match.
Before choosing E, check all four paragraphs for the specific fact, not the topic. Before rejecting E, check that the paragraph you prefer actually contains the fact rather than just the subject.
Practise it
Five questions on the matching part: paraphrase, order, and the two opposite ways candidates get option E wrong.