Part 6 Text Completion: reading beyond the blank

It looks like Part 5. It usually isn't.

Sixteen questions, four short texts — an email, a memo, a notice, an article — four blanks each. Three of those four blanks per text are word- or phrase-level, the same surface format as Part 5, and it's tempting to solve them the same way: read the sentence, pick the option. That habit works maybe half the time in Part 6 and quietly wrecks your accuracy on the rest. In the site's own inventory-rollout memo, a blank asks you to complete 'Once the system ______ fully operational next Tuesday, all staff will be required to log shipments through the new scanners' — the correct choice is the present simple 'becomes,' not the future 'will become,' because a time clause with 'once' takes present tense even when the meaning is future. That's a rule you can catch inside one sentence. But other blanks in the same texts aren't so contained: a visitor-access notice asks why arriving visitors 'may experience a short delay,' and the connector that finishes that thought only makes sense once you've registered, from two sentences earlier, that staff need time to verify an appointment. Skip that earlier sentence and every option looks equally plausible.

What Part 6 actually tests that Part 5 doesn't

• Pronoun antecedents: 'it,' 'this,' or 'they' in the blank's sentence often points back to a noun introduced one or two sentences earlier, not the one right next to it.
• Tense agreement with a time marker planted elsewhere in the text — a date, 'next Tuesday,' 'during this window,' 'starting this year' — that anchors the correct tense even when the blank's own sentence has no time word at all.
• Logical sequencing: whether the action in the blank happens before, during, or after an event described in an earlier paragraph, not just what sounds grammatical in isolation.
• In a real item from the site's system-upgrade email, the blank 'if you experience any issues accessing your files ______ the upgrade' is only solvable by remembering that the maintenance window was described three sentences earlier — 'after' is correct because problems would surface once the servers come back, not while they're still down.

The sentence-insertion blank: figure out its job first

Every single Part 6 text has exactly one blank where the four options are complete sentences rather than words. All four are usually well-formed, plausible, standalone sentences — that's what makes this question type harder than it looks, and rushing it the way you'd rush a Part 5 item is the single biggest unforced error in this section. Before you even glance at the options, work out what job the missing sentence needs to do: is it explaining or justifying the claim just made, pivoting to a new but related subtopic, or delivering a concluding instruction or action? In the site's system-upgrade email, the blank sits between 'email and file servers will be temporarily unavailable' and 'the new system is expected to load documents... noticeably faster' — the sentence has to bridge those two ideas, so the correct option is the one that explains what the upgrade actually replaces, not the options about timesheets, training sessions, or password resets that would read perfectly fine in a different email. In the visitor-access notice, the insertion blank follows a sentence introducing a temporary badge — the correct option has to continue that exact thread (what to do with the badge), not just be office-appropriate.

Transition and connector blanks: trace the logic, not the vibe

• 'However' and 'in contrast' require a contradiction or reversal between the surrounding ideas — check that the sentence before genuinely conflicts with the one after, not just differs in topic.
• 'Therefore' and 'as a result' require the second sentence to be a consequence of the first — a shared cause-effect link, not just two related facts placed near each other.
• 'In addition' and 'furthermore' require the second sentence to extend the same point in the same direction — swap it for 'however' mentally and see if the passage still makes sense; if it does, 'in addition' is probably wrong.
• 'Similarly' needs a genuine parallel being drawn, not just two sentences about the same general subject.
• When two connectors both sound acceptable, reread the sentence immediately before the blank one more time — the answer almost always hinges on what that specific sentence claimed, not on general plausibility.

Read the whole text once before answering anything

Because later sentences frequently resolve earlier blanks — a time marker in paragraph two that fixes the tense of a blank in paragraph one, a badge mentioned after the insertion point that confirms which option belongs there — answering blanks in strict top-to-bottom order as you first meet them is a losing strategy. Read the full 100-to-150-word text once for gist: who's writing to whom, about what, and what they want the reader to do. Only then go back and fill the four blanks. This costs maybe ten extra seconds per passage and prevents the much larger cost of committing to a plausible-but-wrong answer on blank one before you've seen the information in blank four that would have ruled it out.

Time budget: Part 6 is not where you should be slow

Sixteen questions across four short texts should take roughly 8 to 10 minutes — call it 30 to 35 seconds per blank once you include the one read-through per passage. That's slower than Part 5's 20-to-25-second target because of the extra reading, but it should never approach the pace of Part 7, where a single question can fairly cost a minute. If a sentence-insertion option has you genuinely torn between two choices after one reread of the surrounding sentences, mark your best guess and move on — Part 7 has more than three times as many questions and considerably less room to recover lost time.