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📖 CHAPTER 1: ABOUT CARS

1,759 words · 1 figures · ≈8 min read · MCAT CARS Review 2026-2027

Chapter 1: About CARS

Chapter 1: About CARS

Chapter 1: About CARS

CHAPTER 1

ABOUT CARS

In This Chapter

1.1 The CARS Section 1.2 Passages 1.3 Question Categories

Foundations of Comprehension

Reasoning Within the Text

Reasoning Beyond the Text

Concept and Strategy Summary

Introduction

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After Chapter 1, you will be able to:

Congratulations! You are about to embark upon an exciting journey down the path to medical school to achieve your goal of becoming a doctor. As you might expect, this particular journey will require thorough preparation. Fortunately, you don’t have to prepare on your own: we are here to help!

As a pre-medical student, you have already seen at least some of the wide variety of science topics that will be tested in the three science sections of the exam. In contrast, the Critical Analysis and Reasoning Skills (CARS) section will present you with a variety of passages from myriad disciplines to which you may have never been exposed. You could see a musicological analysis of Johannes Brahms’s 1868 masterpiece Ein Deutsches Requiem, a philosophical diatribe criticizing Immanuel Kant’s Metaphysics, or a dissection of the political underpinnings of the development of the US Medicare system. For the CARS section, you will be expected to read, understand, and apply the knowledge you gain from these passages. Students often feel ill-equipped for the CARS section of the test, but Kaplan is here to help! This book will help you understand what is expected of you in CARS and will teach you the Kaplan strategies that have paved the way for many thousands of students to become the doctors they deserve to be.

In this chapter, we will go over the structure of the CARS section of the MCAT, as well as the diverse disciplines encountered in CARS passages. We’ll provide a brief overview of the question categories identified by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). Finally, we’ll discuss how to use this book and how it can guide you in preparing for your MCAT and the journey beyond. The journey to becoming a physician may be long, but it is extremely rewarding. Someday in the future, you’ll find yourself putting on your white coat and changing patients’ lives, and having the right plan for success is what will make that future possible.

1.1 The CARS Section

In some ways, the Critical Analysis and Reasoning Skills (CARS) section of the MCAT will be nothing new to you; it is similar to many of the standardized tests you may have taken throughout your academic career, presenting you with passages to read and multiple-choice questions to gauge your understanding. In 90 minutes, you will be presented with 9 passages, each of which will be followed by approximately 5 to 7 questions, for a total of 53 questions. The passages you encounter will be relatively short (but lengthier than the science passages on the test), typically ranging from 500 to 600 words.

Unlike reading comprehension sections you have come across previously, such as those in the SAT® or ACT®, the CARS section of the MCAT has been designed to assess analytical and reasoning skills that are required in medical school. The passages you will face in CARS will be multifaceted, incorporating advanced vocabulary, presenting varied writing styles, and requiring higher-level thought. To answer the accompanying questions, you will have to go beyond merely comprehending the content of a CARS passage: you will need to analyze its rhetorical and logical structure and assess how it impacts (or is impacted by) outside information.

1.2 Passages

The types of passages chosen for CARS consist of multiple paragraphs that require active, critical reading to answer the questions that follow. The passages included in the section are from an array of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, as listed in Table 1.1. Approximately half of the passages (and questions) that you encounter on Test Day will fall in the realm of the humanities, while the other half will be in the social sciences. All of the passages that appear in CARS are selected from books, journals, and other publications similar to those you have come across in academic settings.

Table 1.1 Humanities and Social Sciences Disciplines in the CARS Section1

Humanities Social Sciences

Architecture Anthropology

Art Archaeology

Dance Economics

Ethics Education

Literature Geography

Music History

Philosophy Linguistics

Popular Culture Political Science

Religion Population Health

Studies of Diverse Cultures* Psychology

Theater Sociology

Studies of Diverse Cultures Note: Studies of Diverse Cultures can be tested in both humanities and social sciences passages.

For students who have exclusively focused on the sciences, information for the fields used in the CARS section may be presented in a strikingly different way that can sometimes seem overwhelming. This book will review the writing styles used for the passages in CARS and explain how to read these passages with purpose, which will ultimately make them much less intimidating and significantly more manageable.

1.3 Question Categories

The AAMC has identified three categories of questions in CARS that will assess your critical thinking skills: Foundations of Comprehension, Reasoning Within the Text, and Reasoning Beyond the Text.

Foundations of Comprehension

These questions tend to be straightforward. They will ask about the main idea of a passage, specific details from within the passage, inferences that can be drawn from the passage, or the likely meaning of a word or phrase based on context. These questions are the most similar to those you have seen in previous standardized tests because they ask only for reading comprehension (understanding what you have read). Questions in Foundations of Comprehension will make up approximately 30 percent of the questions in CARS, or about 16 questions.

In Chapter 9 of MCAT CARS Review, we will further dissect the four question types within Foundations of Comprehension:

Reasoning Within the Text

Reasoning Within the Text questions require greater thought than Foundations of Comprehension questions because they will ask you to identify the purpose of a particular piece of information in the context of the passage, or ask how one piece of information relates to another (as a piece of evidence that supports a conclusion, for example). Questions in Reasoning Within the Text will also make up approximately 30 percent of the questions in CARS, or 16 questions.

In Chapter 10 of MCAT CARS Review, we will further dissect the two main question types within Reasoning Within the Text and a few other, rare questions that fit into this category:

Reasoning Beyond the Text

Reasoning Beyond the Text questions focus on two specific skills: the capacity to extrapolate information from the passage and place it within new contexts, and the ability to ascertain how new information would relate to and affect the concepts in the passage. Questions in Reasoning Beyond the Text will make up approximately 40 percent of the questions in CARS, or 21 questions.

In Chapter 11 of MCAT CARS Review, we will further dissect the two main question types within Reasoning Beyond the Text and a few other, rare questions that fit into this category:

Conclusion

This chapter is only the beginning. Now that we have covered the structure of the CARS section, we will dive into the tools and strategies that will help you score points on Test Day. In Chapter 2, we will begin with a thorough explanation of the tools (both physical and within the testing interface) that will be available to you on Test Day.

In Chapter 3, we begin with an examination of rhetoric and its application in the CARS section, then move into analysis of arguments. Chapter 4 explains the Kaplan CARS Passage Strategy, with guidance and tips on previewing CARS passages. Chapter 5 continues the strategy with a discussion of the use of keywords to extract valuable information as you read the passage. Chapter 6 describes the three ways in which you can choose to Distill information from the passage in order to best tackle questions. Chapter 7 integrates the contents of Chapters 4, 5, and 6 into a cohesive passage strategy you can use to approach any passage presented in the CARS section. Chapter 8 introduces the Kaplan Method for CARS Questions, and this method is then applied in the three following chapters to each of the different AAMC categories. Finally, we end with a look at how to review your practice tests to find your personal test-taking pathologies and keep improving that score.

CONCEPT AND STRATEGY SUMMARY

The CARS Section

Passages

Question Categories

1 Adapted from AAMC, The Official Guide to the MCAT 2015 Exam (Washington, D.C.: Association of American Medical Colleges, 2014), 311–322.

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