The subject module for the APS route is the General Academic Module. Its tasks are a typical academic problem followed by several questions about that problem — so the unit of work is the problem, not the question, and the reading you do at the start is paid back several times.
Read the problem once, properly, before the first question. Skimming and coming back costs more than it saves when four or five questions hang off the same material. On that first read, get three things straight: what is being claimed, what the evidence for it is, and what is assumed rather than shown.
Answer from the material, not from your degree. This is the single most expensive habit engineers and commerce graduates bring to a test like this. You are being measured on transfer and application — whether you can reason correctly about material you were handed — not on what you already know. If your answer depends on something the problem did not say, it is wrong even when it is true in the world.
Distinguish the four things a question can ask for. Nearly every question on an academic problem is one of:
- what the text states — findable, and the answer is a paraphrase of a specific line
- what follows from it — a conclusion the text supports but does not spell out
- what it assumes — the unstated thing that must hold for the argument to work
- what would change it — the evidence that would strengthen or weaken the claim
Naming which one you are being asked is most of the work. A "what follows" answer put against a "what is stated" question is the classic near-miss that a well-written option is built to catch.
Quantities, figures and tables. Where a problem carries data, the questions usually turn on reading it correctly rather than computing with it: which axis, which unit, over what period, and whether the trend claimed in the text is the trend the figure shows. Check the label before you check the number.
Single-choice means elimination works. Cross out what contradicts the text, what goes further than the text, and what is true but irrelevant. On a well-built item those three account for three of the wrong options.