Making inferences in informational texts | Reading | Khan Academy

[Music] From the moment she strolled into my office, I could tell she was gonna be a difficult sentence to read. You could tell from the way she walked that she was carrying a lot of information, but getting it out of her wouldn't be easy. I was gonna need to make an inference.

Hey, what's up readers? David here. I'm taking advantage of the cold that I have by doing my serious detective voice in order to teach you about inferences. Hold on, let me get that. Hi, uh, this is David. I'm in the middle of doing a video now. Now isn't a great time. Oh, oh that's great, uh, cool. Follow me over to the next screen.

What is an inference, please? Great, thank you. Was that all you needed? Yeah, that was my whole thing. All right, thanks, bye.

So an inference is a conclusion that you draw from writing. It's an idea that you pull from a sentence or a passage that isn't literally printed there. It's the detective work of reading: finding clues that help you make sense of what's being said. I feel like we're kind of getting bogged down in theory land, so let's take a look at an example.

I went outside and made an enormous snow fort. There's my snow fort, a little d on the flag to represent me. There's my little hot cocoa, couple marshmallows floating in there, my Khan Academy mug. They don't make Khan Academy mugs. I want a Khan Academy mug.

Okay, so what conclusions can we draw from these two sentences? I went outside and made an enormous snow fort. Beautiful, brilliant, enormous. Then I came inside and had a big mug of hot chocolate. Same deal, beautiful, brilliant, enormous.

What conclusions can I draw about this situation? Well, if you're making things out of snow and then you're coming inside and having hot chocolate, it's probably not the height of summer. One inference that I can draw from these two sentences together is that it is wintertime when this sentence takes place. Where I live, these are not activities that one pursues in the height of summer outside.

So I'm looking for clues within the text: snow fort, I'm outside, I came inside, and then I had hot chocolate, which is not traditionally a beverage that is consumed when it's warm out. Let's take a look at another example.

This paragraph is part of a longer passage that is about a young ballet dancer named Michaela. Michaela danced so wonderfully that she was awarded a scholarship to attend the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School at the American Ballet Theater. That was only the beginning of her dancing success. When she was 17, Michaela danced with the Dance Theater of Harlem professional company. Later, she joined the Dutch National Junior Company. Today, Michaela is a soloist with the Dutch National Ballet.

So very quickly, without getting bogged down in this passage, what are some conclusions? What are some inferences that we can draw about Michaela? Who is Michaela? What do we know about her? We know that she's a dancer. We know that she's very good at it, right? She danced so wonderfully that she got a scholarship. So I'm going to say Michaela is very talented.

And we know that her talent led to success because her getting the scholarship was only the beginning of her dancing success. We can see from the passage that she was part of at least three different dance companies: the Dance Theater of Harlem, the Dutch National Junior Company, and as a soloist with the Dutch National Ballet today. So I'm going to say that Michaela is a very hard worker.

Now notice, nowhere in the passage does it say Michaela is a very talented, hard-working dancer. Just like in the previous example, it didn't say it was winter outside, so I made a snow fort. The skill of inference requires you to be a detective and take your magnifying glass to the passage to discover clues.

Imagine you're a detective, like this dog who's wearing a little deer stalker cap. Let's call him Sherlock Bones, the famous dog detective that I just made up. And I feel like Sherlock Holmes is always smoking a pipe, so I'm going to give this dog like a, I don't know, a bone or a piece of rawhide or something.

So imagine that you are a detective or a dog detective if you like, and every time you read a text, let's say a book, that you are searching for clues within it. What you're doing when you make an inference is you are taking the information that you already know about the world, and the places and people in it, and how they behave, and what they look like, and what they do, and you're applying that knowledge to the text.

When do people build snowmen? When do people build snow forts? When do they drink hot cocoa? In the wintertime. An important thing to remember though is that inferring is not guessing. Any time you make an inference, you have to be pulling it directly from the text. That's your jumping-off point. It can't just be a wild guess out of nowhere. It comes from information that you've got there on the page.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go eat my weight in cough drops. You can learn anything. Dave it out.