TEAS® Reading Study Guide

Drawing Conclusions

What an inference is. An inference is a conclusion the passage strongly implies but never states outright. The author leaves a gap, and the text gives you everything you need to fill it. Inference questions are often signaled by phrasing like "the passage suggests," "it can be inferred," "the author implies," or "the reader can conclude." These are asking you to read between the lines — but only as far as the lines themselves will carry you.

The defend-it test. The single most useful check for any inference is this: can I point to something in the passage that supports this? A valid inference is one you could defend by quoting or paraphrasing the text. If you find yourself reaching for outside knowledge, a personal assumption, or "well, that’s usually how it works," you’ve left the passage behind, and the choice is wrong. The correct inference stays tethered to the text.

Avoiding the over-reach. The most common inference trap is the answer that goes too far. A passage might imply that a policy had mixed results; a too-strong choice will claim the policy "failed completely." A passage might suggest a character is nervous; an over-reach will say the character is "terrified." Extreme words — always, never, all, none, completely, impossible — are red flags on inference questions, because passages rarely support that much certainty. The safe inference is usually the more measured one, the conclusion that stays proportional to the evidence.

Drawing conclusions across a passage. Some questions ask you to combine several stated facts into a conclusion the author didn’t spell out. Treat this like connecting dots: if the passage says the store’s sales fell every month after the new highway opened, and traffic past the store dropped sharply, you can reasonably conclude the highway hurt business — even though the passage never says so directly. You’re synthesizing what the text established, not inventing something new.

The method: identify what the passage states, then ask what it implies just beyond that. Test each answer choice with "can I defend this from the text?" Eliminate choices that need outside assumptions and choices that overshoot the evidence. Choose the conclusion that is both supported and proportional.

Worked example:

By the third day of the storm, the shelter’s supply shelves were nearly empty, and volunteers had begun turning people away at the door.

You can infer that demand had outstripped the shelter’s resources, and that the situation was becoming difficult to manage. The passage never states this directly, but "nearly empty" shelves and "turning people away" support it. What you couldn’t infer is that the shelter would close permanently — that overshoots what the text gives you.