Introduction
Command of Evidence questions make up part of the Information and Ideas domain, which accounts for roughly 26% of Reading and Writing operational questions. Within that domain, one recurring question type presents you with a short passage containing a partially supported claim, a data table or graph, and four answer choices — each offering a different piece of data. Your job: find the one option whose data is both accurate (correctly read from the graphic) and relevant (actually supports the specific claim the passage is making).
This note focuses exclusively on that two-part filter — accuracy plus relevance — applied to quantitative evidence. For selecting evidence from text rather than graphics, see the sibling note Supporting a Claim with Textual Evidence.
Core Concept
Every question in this category gives you two things to juggle simultaneously:
- A graphic — a table, bar graph, or line graph displaying numerical data. (For help reading these formats, see the prerequisite note Reading Tables, Bar Graphs, and Line Graphs.)
- A claim — a sentence or two in the passage that makes a specific, narrow assertion, with a blank where the supporting data should go.
The correct answer must clear both of the following tests:
Test 1 — Accuracy: The numbers, percentages, or trends stated in the option actually appear in or can be correctly calculated from the graphic. An option that distorts, misreads, or inverts a figure fails here.
Test 2 — Relevance: The data directly addresses the specific variable, category, time period, or comparison that the claim is about. An option that is factually true but describes something the claim is not about fails here.
The most seductive wrong answers are "true-but-irrelevant" options: they report real numbers from the graphic, yet those numbers describe the wrong category, the wrong year, or the wrong comparison. Careless readers choose them because the figures look credible. Your defense is to re-read the claim's exact wording before evaluating any option.
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