GAMSAT Section 1 practice: humanities and social sciences
Section I is 62 multiple-choice questions in 100 minutes on prose, poetry, cartoons and social science writing. Here’s what it rewards, how to read for it and an original practice question to try.
Section I, Reasoning in Humanities and Social Sciences, tests how well you understand and interpret written and visual material. You’ll meet literary prose, poetry, philosophical and ethical arguments, social science writing, cartoons, and occasionally tables or graphs.
Most questions ask you to do one of a few things:
Infer what a writer implies but doesn’t say.
Read tone and attitude, including irony and ambivalence.
Follow an argument and spot its assumptions or the evidence that would weaken it.
Interpret imagery in poetry and figurative prose.
Compare perspectives when two passages or speakers disagree.
Try a Section 1 practice question
An original passage written by Get Into Med in the style of the exam. Choose your answer, then open the explanation.
Section I / Prose
My grandmother kept every receipt she was ever given. They lived in shoeboxes under the spare bed, sorted by year and bound with the rubber bands that came on the newspaper. When we cleared the house we found 1974 beside 2009, as if the decades had agreed to share a room. My uncle wanted to burn them in the yard. I took one box home, telling myself it was for the tax office, though she had been dead for three years and owed nobody anything.
The narrator’s reason for keeping one box is best described as
A a practical concern about the grandmother’s unfinished tax affairs.
B an attachment the narrator covers with an excuse that doesn’t hold.
C a protest against the uncle’s plan to burn the receipts.
D curiosity about how prices changed over the decades.
Show the answer and explanation
B. “Telling myself” signals that the stated reason is a story the narrator is telling, not a belief. The final clause undoes it: the grandmother “owed nobody anything”, so the tax reason can’t be real. That rules out A. The passage never says the narrator objected to the uncle (C) or wanted to study the receipts (D). What’s left is an attachment the narrator never names, which is the point of the passage.
How to approach Section 1
Read for the writer’s position first. Before the questions, ask what the writer thinks or feels and how you know. Most wrong options misread this.
Watch the small words. Qualifiers like “telling myself”, “supposedly” or “of course” often carry the tone of a whole passage.
Rule options out with the text. An option can be true in the world and still wrong because the passage doesn’t support it.
Don’t get stuck on a poem. If a unit isn’t landing, answer what you can, flag it and come back. Every question is worth the same and wrong answers cost nothing.
Keep an eye on the clock. At roughly 1.6 minutes per question, check your pace at each quarter of the paper.
Section 1 practice on Get Into Med
A pass opens Section I units on prose, poetry, ethics and social science, each with its own set of questions. Every answer comes with an explanation of why the right option is right and where the others go wrong. You can also write a line on how you got there and get feedback on your reasoning.
The free plan starts with a daily Section III unit, so you can try the format before deciding whether to upgrade.
Common questions
How many questions are in GAMSAT Section 1?
62 multiple-choice questions in 100 minutes, arranged in units that each share a passage, poem, cartoon or set of data. That’s a little over a minute and a half per question, including reading time.
Do I need to know any literature or philosophy?
No. Everything you need is in the material on the page. What helps is being practised at reading closely and quickly across many kinds of writing, which is why regular practice matters more than background knowledge.
How do I get faster at Section 1?
Read a little of something unfamiliar every day, such as essays, poetry, opinion columns or old speeches, and practise timed units. Speed comes from recognising what a question is asking for, not from skimming.
