VR - Hard vs Soft Qualifiers

Hard Qualifiers are definitive terms such as ‘all’ or ‘none’. Soft Qualifiers are more general and non-definitive terms such as ‘some’ or ‘many’. When answering Verbal Reasoning ‘True, False or Can’t Tell’ Questions, we can use these qualifiers to guide our answers. Now, this is not a definitive rule, and will not always apply, but it is a useful guide.

To summarise: Questions that contain Hard Qualifiers will often fall into the ‘False’ or ‘Can’t Tell’ options. Questions that contain Soft Qualifiers will commonly fall into the ‘True’ option.

This is useful to remember when you are feeling stuck on a difficult question or when you are running out of time at the end of your Verbal Reasoning section. But you should still search the text to confirm your guess whenever possible.

I have included some examples of hard and soft qualifiers below:

Thank you for reading this article! If you have any suggestions on how we might improve, or any questions, please get in contact!