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LSAT reading comprehension question types come down to six recurring families: main point, author attitude, detail, inference, function, and analogy. Three are answered from your structural map and three send you back to specific lines. Knowing which kind you have is most of the speed.
There are six that recur, and they divide cleanly into questions the passage answers directly and questions you have to build an answer to. Knowing which kind you have decides whether you go back to the text or reason from your map.
TypeWhat it asksWhere the answer comes fromMain pointWhat the passage as a whole is doingYour one-sentence author position, not the textAuthor attitude or toneHow strongly and in what direction the author holds a viewAdjectives and hedges across the whole passageDetail or according to the passageWhat the passage explicitly says about somethingA specific line, which you go back and findInference or most strongly supportedWhat follows from what the passage saysOne or two lines, combined, without outside knowledgeFunction or roleWhy a sentence or paragraph is thereYour paragraph verbs, not the sentence's contentAnalogy or applicationWhich outside situation matches a principle in the passageThe abstracted principle, restated in your own words first
One question people always ask about reading comprehension question types is how many appear per test. There is no honest answer to give. LSAC does not publish how many questions of each type appear on a given test, and no honest page can give you a percentage without inventing it.
What is published is the scored structure: the LSAT is two scored Logical Reasoning sections and one scored Reading Comprehension section, four 35-minute sections in total including one unscored variable section, with a 10-minute intermission after section two, per LSAC's own test specifications (https://www.lsac.org/lsat/register-lsat/accommodations/specifications-lsat-and-lsat-argumentative-writing). Two of the three scored sections are Logical Reasoning, so LR carries roughly two thirds of your scored questions.
That ratio is worth planning around. A per-type count is not, because nobody outside LSAC has one.
Any table you find online listing RC types with percentages was assembled by someone counting released tests by hand. That is a reasonable thing to do and it is not a published specification, so it should not carry the weight people give it.
Plan on the structure instead. Reading Comprehension is one of the three scored sections, four passages appear per section, and every passage carries a spread of these six types.
Do them in the order given, with one exception. The main point question, when it appears first, is worth answering immediately because you already wrote its answer during the read.
The real ordering decision is within a question, not between questions. Detail questions want you back in the text before you read the choices.
Inference and function questions want you to predict from your map before you read the choices. Getting that backwards is what makes the section feel slow.
Skipping around costs more than it saves, because each jump means relocating yourself in the passage. The exception is a single question that has already taken ninety seconds; leave it, finish the set and come back with the rest of the passage fresh in mind.
Function questions and inference questions carry the most weight per question because they are the two that structural reading makes easy and careful reading leaves hard.
Function questions ask why a sentence is where it is. If you tagged the paragraph with a verb, you have the answer before you look at the text. If you did not, you are reconstructing the author's intent from scratch under time pressure.
Inference questions ask what must follow. The discipline is the same as in Logical Reasoning: no outside knowledge, no plausible extras, and a correct answer that is usually weaker and duller than the one you hoped for.
Suppose a passage's second paragraph, written for this example, opens by describing a rival explanation for a pattern in coastal sediment, spends four sentences on its details, and ends by noting that it cannot account for the deposits above a certain depth.
A content reader remembers coastal sediment and rival explanation. A structural reader wrote raises rival, then disqualifies it.
Now the question asks why the author discusses the rival explanation. The structural reader answers in four seconds and does not go back to the text at all. That difference, repeated across a section, is what the method buys.
Every LSAC figure on this page was taken from LSAC's own pages and last checked on July 26, 2026. Prices, dates and policies move without notice, so the source link sits next to each number rather than in a bibliography at the bottom.
Where LSAC has not published something, this page says so in those words rather than filling the hole with a plausible number. That is the difference between a gap and a guess, and only one of them is safe to plan around.
Main point, author attitude, detail, inference, function or role, and analogy or application. The first two and function come from your structural map; detail and inference send you back to specific lines.
Work in the order given, answering a main point question immediately if it appears first. The more useful ordering decision is whether to return to the text before reading the choices, which depends on the type.
It varies by passage, and LSAC does not publish a fixed per-passage count. The published structure is one scored Reading Comprehension section, per LSAC's own test specifications.
The standard is the same, which is what follows without outside knowledge. The material is longer, so the discipline of refusing plausible extras matters more, not less.
Only if you can identify it in twenty seconds, which most people cannot. Scanning for difficulty usually costs more time than it saves, and difficulty judgments made from the first paragraph are unreliable.
Written by Ali, Georgetown Law, founder of Lovare Institut.
August 5, 2026
August 5, 2026