True/False/Can't tell looks like the easy part of VR and quietly costs people the most marks. The questions are not hard to reason about — they are hard to discipline yourself on. Almost every avoidable error here comes from one of two things: a fuzzy definition or a stray piece of outside knowledge.
The three definitions, precisely
True means the passage states or directly supports the statement. False means the passage states or directly supports the opposite. Can't tell means the passage simply does not give you enough to decide either way. The trap is the gap between False and Can't tell: a statement the passage never addresses is Can't tell, not False.
The outside-knowledge trap
This is the single biggest source of errors in the whole section. Your task is to judge the statement against the passage only — not against what you happen to know is true in the real world. A statement can be completely correct in reality and still be Can't tell, simply because the author never said it. Read like the passage is the only source of truth in existence.
Worked example: the absolute statement
Suppose a passage says a new policy reduced waiting times at several hospitals, and a statement reads: the policy reduced waiting times at every hospital. The word every makes this an absolute claim. The passage supported some, not all, so this is False — one strong word turned a supported idea into an unsupported one.
Worked example: the plausible-but-absent claim
Now a statement reads: the policy was popular with hospital staff. It sounds reasonable, and in real life it might well be true. But if the passage only discussed waiting times and never mentioned staff opinion, you have nothing to go on. That makes it Can't tell — resist the pull to fill the gap with common sense.
Keyword scanning versus concept scanning
Hunting for a literal keyword works only when the statement contains something unique like a date, a name or a figure. More often the idea you need is phrased differently in the passage, so chase the concept instead: ask yourself what idea must be present for this statement to be true, then scan for that idea however it is worded. Concept scanning finds answers that pure keyword scanning walks straight past.
Work question-first
For statement questions, read the statement before you dive into the detail. Decide the concept you are looking for, then scan the part of the passage your initial reading mapped it to. This keeps each question under 30 seconds and stops you from re-reading the whole passage four times over.