Yes / No / Not Given uses the same three-way logic you installed in True / False / Not Given — but points it at a different target. TFNG grades the passage's facts; YNNG grades the writer's claims. This lesson teaches the one extra skill the variant demands: separating what the author asserts from what the author merely reports.
Same rule, new target
The decision rule does not change:
Does the writer's argument confirm this claim, contradict this claim, or stay silent about it?
- The writer asserts it (directly or by clear implication) → YES
- The writer asserts the opposite → NO
- The writer takes no position on it → NOT GIVEN
Everything from the TFNG lesson carries over: locate first, judge by meaning not word-match, demand contradicting words before writing NO, watch the quantifiers. What changes is whose voice you are grading. YNNG appears with argumentative passages — usually Passage 3 — where the author has opinions, cites other people's opinions, and disagrees with some of them. The test builds its traps in the gap between those voices.
Asserted vs reported: the core distinction
Read these two constructed sentences:
Remote work improves productivity.
Several early studies claimed that remote work improves productivity.
The first is the author asserting. The second is the author reporting — telling you what someone else said while committing to nothing. If the statement to judge is "Remote work increases productivity", the first passage gives YES; the second gives NOT GIVEN, because the author has not taken a side. And if the second sentence continues "…but these findings have not survived replication", the author is now signalling doubt — and a statement crediting the claim may even be NO.
The rule: an opinion inside a reporting frame belongs to the person being reported, not to the author — until the author endorses or rejects it.
So your job on every YNNG statement is a two-step attribution check:
- Who does the statement attribute the view to? Usually the writer ("the writer believes…", or an unattributed claim, which defaults to the writer).
- Does the writer actually hold it? Look at the frame around the located sentence.
Reading the frames
Authors flag their position with small, easily-skimmed-over words. These are worth knowing as a closed list, because they decide marks:
| Frame | Signal words | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Neutral report | X claims, argues, suggests, according to, it has been said | Author position: unknown. On its own → NOT GIVEN territory |
| Endorsement | X rightly points out, as X demonstrates, convincingly, indeed | Author adopts the view → counts as the writer's claim |
| Rejection | X claims… however / but this ignores / this view underestimates | Author opposes the view → the opposite counts as the writer's claim |
| Hedge | may, might, perhaps, it is possible that, appears to | Author commits only to possibility. A statement asserting certainty → NOT GIVEN or NO, not YES |
| Concession | admittedly, of course X, granted — followed by but… | The author's real position comes after the but. Judge against that clause |
The rejection frame is the classic trap. The passage spends three admiring sentences describing a theory — plenty of keyword matches for your scan — and then dismantles it in the fourth. Candidates who confirm by word-match answer YES; the writer's actual position is NO. This is why the confirm-by-meaning step from location discipline tells you to read one sentence beyond your landing point, especially when the next sentence starts with however, but, or yet.
Hedges are the quiet trap. If the writer says a policy may have contributed to a decline, and the statement says the policy caused the decline, the writer has not asserted that. The strength of the claim is part of the claim.
Worked micro-example
Passage: Some economists insist that automation will eliminate more jobs than it creates. The evidence for this is thinner than its popularity suggests: every previous wave of mechanisation has, within a generation, produced net employment growth.
Statement 1: Automation will destroy more jobs than it creates. → NO. The claim is reported (some economists insist) and then rejected by the author (evidence… thinner, plus a counter-argument). Statement 2: Previous waves of mechanisation eventually increased total employment. → YES. Asserted directly by the author, in her own voice. Statement 3: The author believes automation should be slowed down. → NOT GIVEN. The author disputes a prediction; she says nothing about what should be done.
Statement 3 shows the most common NOT GIVEN shape in YNNG: a recommendation attributed to a writer who only ever made a description. Descriptions, predictions, evaluations and recommendations are different claim types — check that the statement's type matches what the writer actually produced.
Procedure
- Statements follow passage order, same as TFNG.
- Underline the opinion-holder in the statement ("the writer", "researchers", a named person) before scanning — it is part of what must match.
- At your located sentence, read the frame: reporting verb? endorsement? a however one sentence later?
- Demand explicit opposition before writing NO. If you are inferring the author "probably wouldn't agree", it is NOT GIVEN.
Your drill
Fifteen minutes, one focused pass.
- Open Reading 2026-02 Test 1 and find the Yes/No/Not Given set (it will be attached to the most argumentative passage). Before answering, go through the relevant paragraphs and mark every reporting frame — circle claims, argues, according to, however, may.
- Answer the set. For each answer, write A (author's own assertion) or R (reported view) next to it. Any YES sitting on an R without an endorsement frame is a mistake — re-judge it.
- Check, then classify each miss: attribution error, missed rejection frame, or hedge-strength mismatch.
- Repeat later this week with Reading 2026-04 Test 3.
Once the attribution check is automatic, YNNG stops being a separate question type. It is TFNG with one extra column in your head: who said it, and did the writer sign it?