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TOPIK I Reading: How to Solve "Which One Does Not Match" Questions
Level
A2
Type
Guide
Theme
Reading strategy
작성자
Y
작성시각
A short notice, schedule, or table appears, four sentences follow, and the task is picking the one sentence that does not match what the text actually says. Together with its closely related sibling type, which asks for the statement that does match, this kind of detail-comprehension question makes up the largest chunk of points in TOPIK I reading, so getting comfortable with its traps pays off more than most other reading skills on the test.
What the Question Actually Asks
The instruction reads 다음을 읽고 맞지 않는 것을 고르십시오, and it sits among the detail-comprehension items in the 40s question range. Three of the four choices restate something the text says, just in different words. The fourth choice changes one detail just enough to make it false, while still sounding like it belongs with the rest.
Read the Passage Before Looking at the Choices
Reading all four choices first and then hunting for each one in the text wastes time and invites confusion, since the choices are designed to sound similar to each other. It helps more to read the short passage completely once first, noting the who, what, when, and where, which makes it much faster to spot which choice breaks from what was just read.
Check Numbers, Times, and Days First
The easiest changes to catch are the ones involving specific details: a price that got raised or lowered, a closing time shifted by an hour, a day of the week swapped for another. These edits don't require understanding any deeper meaning, only comparing a number or word in the choice against the matching detail in the text. Scanning for this kind of mismatch before anything else clears out one wrong answer quickly in most cases.
Watch for Reversed Relationships
A trickier version of the trap keeps every number and word the same but flips who does what to whom, or reverses a cause and its result. A notice might say a discount applies only to members, while the wrong choice says it applies to everyone. A text might say an event was postponed because of rain, while the wrong choice reverses it so the rain happened because of the event. These require rereading the exact clause in the text, not just recognizing the same words in a different order.
Confirm the Answer by Elimination
Since three choices are true and only one is false, marking each choice with a quick check or an X while reading through them keeps track of which ones have already been confirmed against the text. If two choices still seem possibly false after a first pass, going back to the sentence in the text that each one is based on almost always shows a small detail that was missed the first time.
Getting this question type right consistently comes down to matching each choice against exactly what the text says, not against a general impression of what the passage was about.