Continuing on from previous posts about common question types, this post will cover another frequently seen question type – one that asks for the “general topic” or “main theme” of a paragraph, or a variation on these. An example we will discuss is below.

In a socio-demographic study in 1988 among Lebanese, Turkish and Vietnamese women in Sydney, migrant women were found to be, much less likely than Australian women generally to report sterilisation operations. Compared with the Australian population, these migrant groups were more likely to marry earlier, to start childbearing earlier, to have larger family sizes, to use traditional methods of contraception in their earlier years and to turn to oral contraception and IUD use at a later age. Hysterectomy was also far less common. Among the migrant women aged 40-49, hysterectomy was reported by 3-7% across different groups of migrant women. Compare this with a national sample survey in 1986, which showed that 15 per cent of women aged 40-49 years reported having had a hysterectomy.

The general topic discussed in this paragraph in relation to the 1988 study is differences between migrant groups and Australian women generally…

•  in the reported use of sterilisation procedures
•  in terms of hysterectomy rates
•  in socio-cultural attitudes towards family planning
•  in the reported use of contraception

The first thing worth noticing is that all four of the answers are indeed covered within the text – we can’t rule any of them out for being wrong straight away. However, the important thing with any question asking for the “main” or “general” aspect of a paragraph is to pick the broadest, most overarching of the answers. As an example, hysterectomy is mentioned several times, but falls under the topic of sterilisation, so hysterectomy is not the general topic. Sterilisation itself also comes under the topic of contraception, as sterilisation is one possible route of contraception, and so sterilisation is not the general topic either. Finally, contraception is only a part of family planning, which also covers ideas about family size and the age of marriage and childbirth. Family planning is thus the broadest, most overarching of the answers here, and is the correct answer.

The big trick to be careful of in these question types is not to always pick the answer that has the most written about it, but is only a specific example of a bigger general topic. In this paragraph, sterilisation and hysterectomy are talked about a lot, so it is easy to pick one of these as an answer, but as we said before they are only part of the larger general topic of family planning.