7 Tips & Strategies for Answering True/False Questions
How to answer true or false questions? Besides studying, it seems ironic that the genre of questions that asks about truthfulness is also deceptive in its straightforward appearance. Answering the questions accurately requires a careful and skillful approach. Here, we have seven tips that will help you navigate the dilemma of true or false.
1. True Statements Must Be Fully True
If any part of the statement is wrong, the entire statement is wrong, and the answer is “false.” For a statement to be true, it must be true and not contain anything incorrect from start to finish. That is when you may answer “true.” This is especially helpful for long or convoluted statements.
For example, the statement: "All mammals lay eggs." This statement is false because not all mammals lay eggs; mammals give birth to live young. Therefore, the statement contains something incorrect and cannot be fully true. The answer is false.
2. Watch Out for Quantifiers
Quantifiers are words, often adverbs, that either restrict or open up the scope of general statements. Common examples include “sometimes, often, frequently, ordinarily, generally, never, always, every," just to name a few.
Qualifiers that are absolute words, such as “every, all, no, none, never,” are restricting quantifiers. They imply that the statement must always be true and have no counterexamples for it to be considered “true.”
However, qualifiers that are not absolute, such as “usually, sometimes, occasionally,” imply that the statement can have exceptions and still be true. If there are cases where the original statement is true, then the answer is true.
For example, for the statement “leaves are usually green,” there are cases where leaves are green; thus, the answer is true.
3. Simplifying Long Statements
Long statements usually contain smaller statements that can be deemed true or false (let us call them “phrases”) that are connected with either punctuation or conjunction words such as “and,” “or,” “because,” “that,” and others. Divide the long statement into these phrases and analyze the truthfulness of each of them.
When doing this step, it’s important to know that the entire statement is false; if any of these phrases contain incorrect information, the entire statement is false. All of these phrases must be correct for the statement to be true.
4. Find Proof
What do you use to answer true or false questions? You use your knowledge to determine whether or not something is true or false. Therefore, when answering such questions, try to use knowledge to find any evidence as to whether or not the statement is true.
For example, if you encounter the statement “0 is a positive number”, you may recall in mathematics class that the definition of a positive number is “any number greater than 0”, which contradicts the statement in question, thus making it false.
Remember: use your knowledge of the subject matter to guide you. Don’t make assumptions, nor let your biases get in the way.
5. Take Care of Negatives
Negative words, such as “no, not, none,” or negative suffixes, such as “non-” or “un-,” may also add confusion in true or false questions. When this happens, one tip is to cover up the negative in the statement or phrase. If the statement is true with the negative covered, the original statement is false, and vice versa.
The two negatives can cancel out each other for statements containing two negatives or double-negative. For example, “not unable” means “able,” and “not impossible” means “possible.”
6. Know How “If-Then” Relations Work
For statements that take the form of “If [phrase A], then [phrase B],” if phrase A being true will logically lead to phrase B being true, then the original statement is true. Here, it does not matter if phrase A is true; as the “if” implies, we should assume phrase A is true and assume whether or not it will cause phrase B to be true.
For example, we have the statement, “If it rains, the ground might be wet.” Raining will lead to a possibility for the ground to be wet. Therefore, this statement is correct. However, if the statement is “If the ground is wet, then it rained,” false because the ground being wet doesn’t lead to “it rained” being true.
7. Guess If You Must
As the name suggests, true or false questions only have two answers. If you guess, you will have a 50% chance of being correct. Therefore, if you spend yourself completely stumped or taking too long to find an answer, taking the risk, guessing an answer, and moving on might be a good choice.
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