Main idea questions ask you to summarize the passage as a whole or to identify the author’s overall purpose in writing the passage. You might see questions asking you to pick out the “central” or “main” idea or asking you what the author was “primarily concerned with.”
Conversely, details questions do ask you to identify facts, details, descriptions or sub-topics. The details they ask about will always be explicitly stated, and sometimes the relevant part(s) of the passage will be highlighted to make it easier for you to find it.
Inference questions, on the other hand, ask you to identify what is implied by the author but not explicitly stated. Rather than “the passage states that,” these kinds of questions will begin with something like “the passage suggests that,” so you immediately know that you’ll need to connect the dots yourself.
Out-of-context questions ask you to apply information from the passage to a different context. They often ask you to identify a parallel situation or analogous example. You’ll also see out-of-context questions asking whether the author would agree or disagree with something.
Logical structure questions center on function. Sometimes you’ll be asked to assess how a passage is constructed (does it define an idea, compare and contrast, refute an idea, etc.); other times you’ll be asked to recognize underlying assumptions, strengths, and weaknesses of the passage’s argument
Style and tone questions ask you about the author’s expression of ideas through diction, or word choice. You may have to deduce the author’s attitude toward a specific idea he/she brings up or identify the tone of the passage as a whole.
The Verbal section gives you 65 minutes for 36 questions, or a little under two minutes per question. But reading comprehension questions are going to take a bit longer than the critical reasoning questions, and significantly longer than the sentence correction questions.
Words like “consequently,” “because,” and “thus” and phrases like “as a result.” Agreeing/further expounding upon the same argument: words like “similarly” and “furthermore” and phrases like “in addition.”