Your brain holds about ten things; the passage contains a hundred. Choose what you keep.
Most students try to remember everything from a passage. Your working memory holds roughly ten pieces of information; a passage contains a hundred or more. So whatever you do, you will forget most of it — the only question is whether you choose what survives, or leave it to chance.
The game-changer is deliberate retention: decide in advance what you keep and what you let go. Think of a bubble tea — pearls mixed through the drink. Instead of trying to pour the whole drink into a small glass, pick out only the pearls. The glass fills entirely with what matters.
Keep the pearls: the author's main idea or contention; the tone — supportive, critical, neutral; the categorisation — which topics are discussed and roughly where in the passage they live; and only the facts a question is likely to hang on.
Drop the drink: examples and case studies (unless they directly carry a point), detailed explanations, background colour, and anything that does not support the main argument. You can always return to a detail once a question tells you it matters — that is what the categorisation map is for.
Target forty to fifty seconds for the initial read. Read in chunks of text, not word by word, and do not re-read — a second pass is almost always a worse use of time than moving to the questions and scanning back deliberately.
This skill is the engine of the whole section: for most students, getting from a 400-level to a 600-level VR score is ninety percent passage reading. Drill it before you drill anything else.