Details

Details questions basically just ask you to retrieve some information that was conveyed in the text.

The wording of these questions can vary more than some of the other types, but we can still identify when we are encountering them. These questions always come right after the cross-text connections question, so if your last question was cross-text connections, you know you're looking at a details question. Other hints are that you might see phrases in the question like "based on the text", "according to the text", "what does the text most strongly suggest about ...", etc. After these questions will come main idea questions, so if you are between cross-text connections and main idea questions, you are probably on one of these.

Once you've read the question, you'll have an idea of what you're looking for in the text. Don't just skim it and try to extract that information though - the context of the full text will normally be helpful to infer the right answer, and these are relatively short passages. Take it one sentence at a time, trying to summarize each sentence in your own words in your head, keeping an eye out for information that relates to the question. Once you have a good feel for the passage, move on to process of elimination with the answer choices.

First of all, expect the right ansewr to be a paraphrase of information conveyed in the text, not something taken verbatim. But in addition to paraphrasing, you may have to make a bit of a logical deduction based on the information in the text. You will NOT have to make any assumptions that aren't supported by the text itself, or apply outside knowledge of the subject matter, you may have to "read between the lines" a bit. For example, if the text says that "there hadn't previously been any fossils of this species discovered in the northern hemisphere", it is reasonable to infer that an answer that says "this was the farthest north that fossils of this species have been found" is correct.