What is Extreme Language in Verbal Tests

Extreme language in verbal reasoning tests is all about spotting subtle differences in words, sentences or paragraphs. It consists of wide range of absolute (i.e. never, always, all, only) and relative words (i.e. closely, nearly, less, fewer) which are often incorporated into text passages or statements to evaluate candidates attention to detail to spot subtle differences in meanings or arguments. This chapter will demonstrate how extreme language creates underlying logic of verbal reasoning tests. It will give useful advice on how to go about answering these types of questions in your assessments. If you wish to see related topcis go sections on how to answer verbal reasoning questions

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How to answer questions with absolute and relative words

As mentioned above, extreme language is one of the major building blocks of verbal reasoning tests. It allows test publishers to create underlying logic of questions to test your ability to correctly infer logically certain conclusions. To demonstrate this consider the below sentence followed by statement. Allow yourself no more than 30 seconds to mark the statement as true, false or cannot say.

 

 

How did it go? Did you mark your answer as cannot say? If yes then well done, if not don't despair but rather read the following explanation to get the grip of the concept. From the argument you can conclude that ‘most’ means majority however as far as the text is concerned you cannot ascertain whether majority or minority of students go to cinema as many could represent majority and minority depending on the size of the sample such quantity of students would be compared to. Hence, the correct answer in this case must be cannot say.

In your verbal reasoning tests if you will come across the statements to be more extreme than the passage then the answer is likely to be false or cannot say. The same if the passage will use less extreme language than the statement the most likely answer is again false or cannot say. For the statement to be true the language must exactly match the argument used in the text and vice versa.

 

Tips for taking verbal aptitude tests

Let’s review another example. Again, allow yourself no more than 30 seconds to evaluate the statement based on the information provided in the sentence.

 

 

How did it go? Did you mark your answer as false? Note the text clearly contradicts the argument as the argument contains more extreme words than the passage. Note that not all but only 99 percent of human body mass is made up of six elements hence the answer must be false. However, if you were asked to conclude whether virtually all human body mass is made up of the six elements then you could conclude the statement to be true as indeed 99 percent is virtually all human body mass.

Many people who take verbal reasoning test miss out on absolute or relative words under tough time limits and loose valuable points which often results in getting insufficient score and flags their verbal reasoning skills as insufficient. Remember, proportion of questions in these tests will generally involve questions with extreme language hence it is important that you undertake practice to train your brain to spot subtle differences in the text or statements which will make all the difference to your score.