The General Educational Development (GED®) tests are a set of tests that may grant a person a high school level equivalent diploma within the United States and Canada. These tests are intended to compare literacy and computational equivalent abilities to those of the upper two-thirds of high school graduates within the United States. GED® questions are divided into five sections: social studies, reading, science, writing, and mathematics.
Social studies comprises approximately 50 questions on the GED® test. These questions examine history, economics, geography, government, and civics. While most will require knowledge only of common facts, some may require information that is not generally known. Test takers may be required to interpret cartoons, graphics, or charts. Other questions may involve reading and understanding.
The writing section of the GED® exam contains two sections: multiple choice and essay. Multiple choice questions may address such subjects as sentence structure, usage, mechanics of writing, and organization. Questions may ask test takers to locate errors within the sentence structure. Essay questions will assess writing skills.
GED® questions in the science portion of the test include 50 multiple choice problems. These questions will relate to three general areas of science: life science, physics and chemistry, and earth and space. About half of these may be based on charts or other graphics. Most questions will only require knowledge of common scientific facts. GED® questions within this section may provide the answers to the question within the graphics or passage provided.
The reading section of this test includes 40 multiple choice questions. The majority of these are literary questions based on works of fiction, plays, and poems. While the rest of this sections is made up of nonfiction questions involving reviews or articles on popular culture. This section of GED® questions will be used to test the reading ability and understanding. Three fiction passages may be provided along with four additional excerpts from plays, poetry, reviews and articles.
The last section of GED® deals with mathematics. The majority of these questions will be multiple choice; a few short answer questions may also be included. The math portion is broken down in two parts with 25 questions each. Section one of the test allows the test taker to use a calculator, while section two does not. Most of the GED® questions in the mathematics can be solved using the basic math skills such as addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication.