The SAT critical reading section includes 48 questions related to reading comprehension. The reading comprehension/analysis questions included in the SAT critical reading section are designed to evaluate an individual's ability to understand the relationship between key concepts in a passage, the individual's ability to understand the passage itself, or the individual's ability to extract an idea from context.

Each of these questions presents a passage of approximately 150 - 850 words that describes information related to topics such as biology, chemistry, earth science, history, literature, politics, and a variety of other topics. The exam-taker must read the passage and use the information from the passage to answer questions associated with the passage.

For example, if a question asked you to read the above paragraph, it might also ask you to identify the main topic of the passage. The choices provided might be:
1.General Academic Topics
2.Sentence Completion Questions on the SAT
3.Reading Comprehension Questions on the SAT
4.Mathematics Section of the SAT
5.Natural Sciences

The answer for this example would be (C), as the passage describes the Reading Comprehension Questions on the SAT. The reading-comprehension questions on the SAT will be presented in a similar format to this example, but the exam-taker may be required to identify or analyze topics or facts that are more subtle than those presented here.