Central Ideas & Details Practice Test

A travel memoir describes arriving in a coastal village during a festival. The narrator tastes citrus pastries, watches children race handmade boats, and hears an elderly singer repeat the same ballad each evening. The memoir mentions that the hotel room is cramped and that the ferry schedule is unreliable. Yet the narrator dwells most on how the festival’s repeated rituals make a stranger feel briefly included, as if the village’s calendar has room for newcomers.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

A passage in a psychology textbook explains that confirmation bias is the tendency to notice and remember information that supports existing beliefs while overlooking contradictory evidence. The author gives an example of a sports fan recalling only the referee calls that hurt their team. The passage also mentions that scientists try to reduce this bias through preregistered studies and blind data analysis. Still, the definition remains central: confirmation bias concerns how people selectively interpret information.

According to the text, confirmation bias is the tendency to