Overall Structure

The question on these problems will always read exactly: "Which choice best describes the overall structure of the text?"

You can think of these problems as similar to the ones asking you about the function of the underlined text, but instead of just covering one sentence, it's covering the entire passage. The correct answer is going to summarize the passage in very general, vague terms. It probably won't get into the specifics of the actual content of the passage, but will summarize each portion of the passage in a manner similar to the way the answers to the underlined function questions are written. The answer choices are likely to be worded something like "The text does X and then does Y". For example, "The text introduces a scientific theory and then provides a counterexample to that theory". Generally, there are at least a couple of claims in each answer choice. Generally those claims are going to be in the same order as where you would find supporting evidence in the passage. So we want to look through each answer choice, look at the first claim, and see if we could consider it a reasonable paraphrase of the beginning of the passage. It it is, we'll then move on to the next claim and ask the same thing. If all the claims seem to be a reasonable paraphrase of what we see in the text, then that answer choice looks pretty good.

Here are some things to look out for to weed out wrong answers: