The Importance of “Contrast” words

Contrasts, along with author’s opinion, are question magnets.

Whenever the passage juxtaposes two or more elements, the differences and similarities are fertile ground for distinguishing the comprehension and reasoning abilities of students. Since contrasts are so important, we provide various sentences and paragraphs with contrasts to practice our recognition of these important elements.

Overview of Methods of Improving Contrast Recognition

1. Learn the most common contrast terms;
2. Practice recognizing the contrast terms in practice sentences and paragraphs;
3. Practice summarizing the contrasts in simple terms as A vs. B or A and B; and
4. Practice isolating and summarizing contrasts in Practice Passage

Contrast Keywords

The most important ones:

BUT; YET; HOWEVER

The others:

• Nonetheless;
• On the contrary;
• On the other hand;
• and yet;
• after all;
• at the same time;
• otherwise;
• notwithstanding