Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • - [David] From the moment she strolled into my office,

  • I could tell she was gonna be

  • a difficult sentence to read.

  • You could tell from the way she walked

  • she was carrying a lot of information,

  • but getting it out of her wouldn't be easy.

  • I was gonna need to make an inference.

  • Hey, what's up readers?

  • David here.

  • I'm taking advantage of the cold that I have

  • by doing my serious detective voice

  • in order to teach you about inferences.

  • (phone ringing)

  • Hold on, let me get that.

  • Hi, this is David.

  • I'm in the middle of doing a video.

  • Now isn't a great time.

  • - [Man On Phone] Hello, I have information about

  • what an inference is.

  • - [David] Oh, oh that's great.

  • Cool, follow me over to the next screen.

  • What is an inference, please?

  • - [Man On Phone] An inference is a conclusion that you make

  • based on clues given in a piece of writing.

  • It's more than a guess,

  • but it's not just an observation either.

  • - [David] Great, thank you.

  • Was that all you needed?

  • - [Man On Phone] Yeah, that was my only thing.

  • - [David] All right, thanks, bye.

  • - [Man On Phone] Goodbye.

  • - [David] So an inference is a conclusion

  • that you draw from writing.

  • It's an idea that you pull from a sentence

  • or a passage that isn't literally printed there.

  • It's the detective work of reading,

  • finding clues that help you make sense

  • of what's being said.

  • I feel like we're kind of getting

  • bogged down in theory land so let's take a look

  • at an example.

  • I went outside and made an enormous snow fort.

  • There's my snow fort.

  • It's a D on the flag to represent me.

  • There's me little hot cocoa,

  • couple marshmallows floating in there,

  • my Khan Academy mug.

  • They don't make Khan Academy mugs.

  • I want a Khan Academy mug.

  • Okay, so what conclusions can we draw

  • from these two sentences?

  • I went outside and made an enormous snow fort.

  • Beautiful, brilliant, enormous.

  • Then I came inside and had a big mug of hot chocolate.

  • Same deal, brilliant, beautiful, enormous.

  • What conclusions can I draw about this situation?

  • Well if you're making things out of snow

  • and then you're coming inside and having hot chocolate,

  • it's probably not the height of summer.

  • One inference that I can draw

  • from these two sentences together

  • is that it is winter time when this sentence takes place.

  • Where I live, these are not activities

  • that one pursues in the height of summer outside.

  • I'm looking for clues within the text.

  • Snow fort, I'm outside, I came inside

  • and then I had hot chocolate

  • which is not traditionally a beverage

  • that is consumed when it's warm out.

  • Let's take a look at another example.

  • This paragraph is part of a longer passage

  • that is about a young ballet dancer named Michaela.

  • Michaela danced so wonderfully

  • that she was awarded a scholarship

  • to attend the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School

  • at the American Ballet Theater.

  • That was only the beginning of her dancing success.

  • When she was 17, Michaela danced with

  • the Dance Theater of Harlem professional company.

  • Later, she joined the Dutch National Junior Company.

  • Today, Michaela is a soloist with the Dutch National Ballet.

  • So very quickly without getting

  • bogged down in this passage,

  • what are some conclusions, what are some inferences

  • that we can draw about Michaela?

  • Who is Michaela?

  • What do we know about her?

  • We know that she's a dancer.

  • We know that she's very good at it, right?

  • She danced so wonderfully that she got a scholarship.

  • So I'm gonna say Michaela is very talented

  • and we know that her talent led to success

  • because her getting the scholarship

  • was only the beginning of her dancing success.

  • We can see from the passage that she was part of

  • at least three different dance companies,

  • the Dance Theater of Harlem,

  • the Dutch National Junior Company,

  • and as a soloist with the Dutch National Ballet today.

  • So I'm gonna say that Michaela is a very hard worker.

  • Now notice no where in the passage does it say

  • Michaela is a very talented, hard working dancer.

  • Just like in the previous example,

  • it didn't say, it was winter outside

  • so I made a snow fort.

  • What the skill of inference is

  • requires you to be a detective

  • and take your magnifying glass to the passage

  • to discover clues.

  • Imagine you're a detective like this dog.

  • He's wearing a little deer stalker cap.

  • Let's call him, let's call him Sherlock Bones,

  • the famous dog detective that I just made up.

  • I feel like Sherlock Holmes is always smoking a pipe

  • so I'm gonna give this dog like a,

  • I don't know a bone or a piece of rawhide or something.

  • Imagine that you are a detective or a dog detective

  • if you like and every time you read a text,

  • let's say a book, that you are searching

  • for clues within it.

  • What you're doing when you make an inference

  • is you are taking the information that you already know

  • about the world and the places and people in it

  • and how they behave and what they look like

  • and what they do

  • and you're applying that knowledge to the text.

  • When do people build snowmen?

  • When do people build snow forts?

  • When do they drink hot cocoa?

  • In the winter time.

  • An important thing to remember though

  • is that inferring is not guessing.

  • Any time you make an inference,

  • you have to be pulling it directly from the text.

  • That's your jumping off point.

  • It can't just be a wild guess out of no where.

  • It comes from information that you've got there on the page.

  • Now if you'll excuse me,

  • I'm going to go eat my weight in cough drops.

  • You can learn anything, David out.

- [David] From the moment she strolled into my office,

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it