RC Passages With Two Competing Views: Track Who Says What

VARC

Some of the hardest RC passages are not hard because of their vocabulary. They are hard because three voices are speaking at once. One group holds a view, another group objects, and the author sits somewhere between them, sometimes agreeing, sometimes only granting a point. By the third paragraph, you are no longer sure who said what.

That confusion is exactly what the questions target. They ask what one side would agree with, or what the author concedes, or which claim belongs to the critics. This guide gives you a simple ledger for tracking voices as you read, and a way to use it on the questions that follow.

Why Two View Passages Are Harder Than They Look

A passage with a single argument is easy to summarise. A passage with competing views needs you to hold several positions in mind and keep them apart. The words overlap, because both sides talk about the same topic, so a claim can sound like it belongs to either.

The author adds a further layer. In many such passages the author does not simply choose a side. They may grant a point to one party, qualify it with a condition, and then move to a view that is neither of the two on offer. A reader who assumes the author sides with whoever speaks last will often be wrong.

Questions exploit this. They ask what a group would most likely agree with, which requires you to know that group's position exactly. They ask what the author would accept, which requires you to separate the author from the groups. And they offer options that are correct statements, attached to the wrong speaker.

The Voice Ledger: Three Columns for Every Passage

The Voice Ledger is a tiny table you draw in the margin or on your rough sheet. It takes seconds to set up and a few words per claim to maintain. Its job is to make ownership visible, so that when a question asks who said what, you are reading from your notes and not from memory.

You do not need full sentences. Three or four words per entry are enough, such as prices scarce road space or hits the inflexible. The aim is to compress, not transcribe. If your ledger grows beyond a few lines per column, you are copying the passage and not extracting its structure.

A Worked Passage: Tracking Three Voices

Here is a short passage written for practice. Economists argue that congestion charges work because they put a price on a scarce resource, road space, and drivers respond to prices. Critics reply that the charge is regressive, falling hardest on those who cannot choose when or where to travel. The author concedes the force of the criticism but notes that cities which return the revenue to public transport have seen the objection weaken.

The ledger for this passage is short. Under the first view: economists, road space is scarce, drivers respond to price. Under the opposing view: critics, the charge is regressive, it hits the inflexible. Under the author: concedes the critics have force, adds that recycling revenue into public transport weakens the objection.

Now a question. Which of the following would the critics most likely agree with? A tempting wrong option says the revenue should be returned to public transport. That claim is in the passage, but it belongs to the author's qualification, not to the critics. The right option talks about the burden on drivers who cannot adjust their travel, which sits squarely in the critics' column.

Voice	Typical cue	What to note
First view	Proponents hold, some argue, it is claimed	The position and who holds it
Opposing view	Critics reply, others object, however some say	The objection and its target
Author	I would argue, this suggests, the author concedes	What is granted, qualified or concluded
Neutral reporting	It has been observed, studies show	Evidence, not a view

Reading the Author's Position Without Over-Reading

The third column is the trickiest, because authors signal their position in subtle ways. A word like concedes, grants or admittedly marks a concession. It shows that the author accepts some part of a view, not the whole of it. A word like nevertheless, still or yet marks a return to the author's own line.

Look also at the verbs the author uses for each side. A neutral verb such as notes or observes reports without endorsing. A strong verb such as insists or maintains often signals the author is describing a view they do not necessarily share. Authors who agree with a view tend to state it in their own voice, without an attribution verb.

Be careful with conditional agreement. In the congestion example, the author does not say the charge is good or bad. They say the objection weakens when revenue is recycled. That is a conditional position, and the question may test whether you notice the condition. An option that says the author endorses congestion charges without qualification overstates it.

Our guide on how certainty, doubt and bias hide in CAT RC language goes deeper on the word choices that reveal an author's stance, and is a good companion to this method.

Using the Ledger on the Questions

Once you have the ledger, most questions in this family become lookups. A question about what a group believes sends you to that column. A question about what the author concedes sends you to the third column and the verb that marks the concession. A question about who made a claim asks you to match a claim to a column.

The wrong options follow familiar patterns. The most common is misattribution, which puts a correct claim in the wrong mouth. Another is merging, which blends the positions of two voices into one statement. A third is overextension, which takes a group's actual claim and makes it stronger or broader than the passage supports.

For each option, ask whose claim it is, and then ask whether the passage supports it in that voice. Options that fail the first question can be dropped without reading the rest. This is quicker than comparing every option with the whole passage, and it is more reliable because ownership is easy to check against your notes.

The same approach supports inference questions. When an option goes beyond the text, check which voice would have to hold it. If it requires a voice that never appears in the passage, it is probably an unsupported inference. Our piece on inference, assumption and implication in CAT RC options shows how to separate those cases.

When the Passage Has More Than Two Views

Some passages introduce a third school of thought, or split one group into factions. The ledger still works. Add a column, or label the entries with initials. The principle is the same: every claim has an owner, and the owner must be visible in your notes.

A subtler case is a view that the author mentions only to set aside. The passage may describe a popular belief, then show why it fails, and then offer the author's own position. In this structure, the popular belief belongs in a column of its own, tagged as rejected. Do not let the length of its description make you think it is the main view.

Passages that describe historical shifts add another wrinkle. One group held a view earlier, another holds a different one now, and the author comments on the change. Tag each claim with its period as well as its owner. Many wrong options blend what a group once believed with what it now believes.

These structures are common in argumentative and opinionated passages, which our guide to argumentative and opinionated VARC passages covers from a different angle. The ledger gives you a tool for the same problem, and the two approaches support each other.

Making the Ledger a Habit Under Time Pressure

You may worry that a ledger costs time you do not have. In practice it saves more than it costs, because it replaces rereading. Without it, you return to the passage for every question, hunting for the sentence that tells you who said what. With it, most of those trips are unnecessary.

Start by practising on untimed passages until the columns feel natural. Then add a clock, and shrink the entries as you speed up. Eventually you will keep the ledger partly in your head and partly in a few margin marks. Our guide on budgeting time per RC passage will help you fit the method into the clock.

Review matters as much as practice. After each passage, check whether your ledger entries matched the passage, and whether you misassigned any claim. Over a few weeks you will see which cues you tend to miss. If you want feedback from someone experienced, you can talk to a CAT mentor, and a CAT study planner can give regular RC sessions a fixed place in your week.