The Question Types That Appear on Verbal Reasoning Tests

Verbal reasoning tests draw on a short and stable list of formats, and knowing which one you are facing changes how you should read. Graduate employer tests are dominated by a passage followed by statements marked true, false or cannot say. Admissions and postgraduate tests lean towards comprehension, text completion and sentence equivalence. School-level batteries add analogies and odd-one-out. The underlying demand is the same throughout: extract exactly what the text supports, and nothing more.

True, false or cannot say

This is the format most candidates mean when they say verbal reasoning test. LSE Careers describes the graduate-level convention plainly: you "read a passage of text and then say whether a statement is true, false or it isn't possible to say, based on what you've just read."

The third option is where the marks live. Cannot say does not mean improbable, contested or unlikely — it means the passage is silent. A statement that is obviously correct in the real world is still a cannot say if the text never addressed it, and the most common failure is importing knowledge. LSE's guidance is explicit: "Do not make assumptions or use your own subject knowledge to answer the questions, use only the information and detail available to you in the test."

There is a second, quieter demand in the format. LSE notes that "One of the more hidden aspects of verbal reasoning is testing your ability to follow instructions." Candidates lose marks by answering a slightly different question from the one on the screen — deciding whether the statement is supported rather than whether it is stated, or vice versa, depending on the wording of the rubric.

A practical reading routine follows from this. Read the statement first, then scan the passage for the specific claim, then decide. Quantifiers do most of the work: all, most, some, only, never, may and must are the words that flip an answer. So do comparatives without a stated baseline — "sales improved" supports nothing about whether they improved faster than a competitor's.

Reading comprehension, text completion, sentence equivalence

ETS uses a different taxonomy on its General Test and names three types: Reading Comprehension, Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence. ETS says the measure assesses the ability to "analyze and evaluate written material and synthesize information obtained from it", to "analyze relationships among component parts of sentences", and to "recognize relationships among words and concepts".

Those three clauses map onto the three types almost one to one. Comprehension items ask what a passage implies, how a paragraph functions in an argument, or which sentence performs a stated role — and ETS's select-in-passage variant asks you to identify that sentence directly. Text completion omits crucial words from a short passage and asks you to restore a coherent whole. Sentence equivalence gives one sentence with one blank and asks for the two options that produce sentences with the same meaning, which is a stricter demand than two words that both fit.

The distinction matters for preparation. Comprehension rewards structural reading; completion and equivalence reward vocabulary held in context, including connectives — although, because, despite, moreover — which signal whether the missing word should agree with the clause beside it or oppose it.