The Three Kinds of MBT Questions on the RC Section

23 February 2026

David McMaster

It seems a super minor point, but it can be worth up to a few points on any given test: there are 3 very different MBT questions on the RC section. Know the difference and increase your chances of getting them all right.

16 years of tutoring, each year slowly learning more about the test. But this "3 Kinds of RC MBT questions" was one of the FIRST things I learned - thanks to The Official LSAT Handbook, published the second year I became a tutor - and no student ever seems to know it. Maybe the test prep companies teach it, maybe not, but there's a good chance it will be useful to you either way.

RC MBT Type 1: Questions About What We Can Infer

Often among the most challenging questions on the section. The LSAC says the answer will be something we can infer as "must be true" whether or not the author intended for us to realize it.

For instance, if in the 1st paragraph the author says offhandedly, "All pigs are round," and then later, in the 4th paragraph and totally unrelated, the author mentions that "everything round is beautiful," then we can infer that "all pigs are beautiful" - regardless of whether that's any part of the author's explicit reasoning in the passage.

RC MBT Type 2: Questions About What the Author Implies

The LSAC claims that these tend to be easier than inference questions. These ask us to pick up on what the author implies without directly stating it.

For example, if the author states, "Luckily, they didn't catch the first train," then the author has NOT explicitly stated that "Better options existed for them than the first train" - but we can clearly pick up on the implication.

RC MBT Type 3: Questions About What's Right There on the Page

Theoretically these should be easy. Way too many times students make them brutally hard.

Because this is a hard test, right? And it requires a lot of thinking, right? And so when an RC question asks "According to the passage," or "The author says," or "The passage states which one of the following," WAY TOO MANY very smart people begin to start theorizing. They start conceptualizing, they begin trying to conjure up some inference from the passage. It can't be as easy as go-find-it, they think; they believe that to get it right they need to engage in deep thought.

But that's not what these questions ask. The LSAT is hyper-literal. They mean what they literally say. The right answer will be something the author explicitly says - something the passage explicitly states, something that's in complete explicit accordance with the passage.

I'm not going to say these are gimmes - though according to the LSAC these tend to be the easiest of the 3 kinds. But I will say: go check out the RC sections you've done recently. If you find a section where you got a bunch of questions wrong INCLUDING one of these, it might not be because it's such a tough section. Getting these questions wrong often indicates either that 1. the student didn't realize how straightforward this MBT question type really is, or 2. the student wasn't on their best game that day.

And yeah, I don't have a nice clever wrap-up for this, so here, have this instead: Why can't you hear pterodactyls in the bathroom? Because their P is silent.