Most students read the passages once, lightly, then hunt back through them for every answer. The faster route is a single active read that leaves the passages annotated, so the argument, the evidence and the tone are already mapped before you reach the questions.
There are no marks for annotation itself. The marks come from the questions. But the quality of your annotation decides how quickly and how accurately you can answer, and on a paper this tight on time that is the whole game. A candidate with a marked-up insert answers a cross-passage question in under two minutes. A candidate without one re-reads the passage from the top and loses eight.
Active reading means reading with a pen and a purpose: you are not just understanding the passage, you are leaving signposts for the version of you who will answer the questions in twenty minutes. Done well, the annotation turns reading into the first half of answering.
Each passage is introduced by a single framing sentence that tells you its stance and scope. Read all three before you read any paragraph. They tell you, in seconds, whether the passages oppose each other or nest inside each other, and that shapes what you expect from the cross-passage questions and the AQ.
Two broad patterns recur. In the first, two passages take opposite sides of a debate and the third complicates both with lived experience. In the second, the passages narrow from a broad view to a specific case to a single voice. Knowing which pattern you are in before you read a word tells you what kind of links the later questions will ask you to make.
Passage 1 is the longest and the most rhetorically dense, and the short comprehension questions are built on it. As you read it, circle any phrase that is figurative, coined or doing more than plain description, because those are the likely vocabulary targets. Mark where the argument turns, and where the writer's attitude shows through word choice rather than statement.
Track the spine of the argument in the margin in your own shorthand. If a paragraph makes a claim, note the claim in three or four words. If the next paragraph gives an example, link it to the claim with an arrow. By the end of Passage 1 you should be able to state its argument in one sentence without rereading it.
Passage 2 is the summary source, so you read it differently. You are not reading for rhetorical effect; you are hunting for distinct, countable ideas. As you go, number each separate point in the margin. The single biggest cause of a capped summary is too few points, and the cure starts here, on the first read, by counting as you go.
Imagine an original passage that argues remote work helps the environment. One paragraph might give three separate reasons: fewer commuting journeys, lower office energy use, and less demand for new office buildings. A passive reader sees one idea, the environment. An active reader marks three. That difference is worth marks when the summary comes.
Passage 3 feeds both cross-passage questions, and the questions always mirror: one asks you to support a claim made elsewhere, the other to undermine a different claim. This means Passage 3 is never purely the positive voice or purely the negative one. It always contains material pointing both ways.
So as you read it, force yourself to mark two things: one idea that could support a claim in Passage 1 or 2, and one idea that could undermine a claim in Passage 1 or 2. Even when the passage leans heavily one way, there is a detail that runs the other way. If you have only marked one direction, keep reading until you find the other.
Tone is the writer's attitude leaking through their choices: the words they reach for, the comparisons they make, the things they treat as obvious. A writer who calls a policy a scheme is more neutral than one who calls it a racket. Reading actively means noticing those choices as you go, because tone questions and use-of-language questions both reward you for spotting them.
Mark the moments where the writer's feeling shows. A loaded adjective, a sarcastic aside, a comparison that flatters or belittles. You do not need to analyse these on the first read; you just need to flag them so that when a question asks about attitude, you are not searching a clean page.
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