Passing the Police Officer Exam: Drawing conclusion questions

Each of these questions will ask you to draw a conclusion based on the information that you read, and typically require more thought than the other reading comprehension questions.  While the reading comprehension questions can be answered simply by reading the passage and finding the appropriate information, the drawing conclusion questions will require you to find a piece of information from the passage and analyze that piece of information in order to answer the question.  Even though these questions are difficult, there are a few important pieces of information that will help you answer these questions on the exam.
 
What the passage means
If a question asks you to draw a conclusion based on the information in the passage you will not find the answer stated outright in the passage.  This is because the reading comprehension questions on the exam that ask you to draw conclusions are designed so that you have to read the passage and take the information included in the passage one step further- they assess your understanding of the material by asking you to think about what the passage actually means (instead of asking you to identify or classify something in the passage).  You will always find some information in the passage that will help you to make your conclusion, but you won't find the answer specifically stated in the passage.  In order to answer these questions, you will have to read the passage, look at each option, and decide what the most logical option is considering the information that you read.

Assumptions
Never assume anything that you can't base on actual information stated in the passage.  Each of the drawing conclusion questions may try to trick you by offering an option that appears to be logical, but that does not make sense based on the information included in the passage.  
 
Example
Passages states:'In most situations, police officers are expected to apprehend criminals before taking any other action.'  
 
From this statement, it is safe to assume that there are situations in which police officers are not expected to apprehend criminals first as the phrase makes it clear that they are expected to apprehend criminals before taking any other action in most situations.  
 
However, even though it is safe to assume that there are situations in which a police officer might be expected to take another type of action before apprehending a criminal, it is not safe to assume what sort of action they might be required to take from this sentence alone.  This is because this sentence doesn't state if police officers are first supposed to aid seriously injured first, call for backup, etc. Since the sentence does not describe the situations in which a police officer would have to take another action first, it is not safe to assume what a police officer might be required to do prior to apprehending a criminal.  In order to answer each of the drawing conclusion questions correctly, you will have to make sure that your conclusion logically follows the information included in the passage.
 
Focus on the information
Finally, in order to answer each of the drawing conclusions questions correctly, you should focus on the information in the passage instead of focusing on what you might know about the topic.  These questions are looking for a conclusion that logically follows what the passage stated - anything that isn't stated in the passage may lead you to choosing the wrong answer.  - they offer options that may be true in real-life, but the options are actually considered incorrect because the passage didn't provide the information you needed to draw that particular conclusion.  
 
Example:
Example passage from above states 'In most situations, police officers are expected to apprehend criminals before taking any other action.' 
 
One of the options states: 'Police Officers are sometimes required to offer assistance to injured individuals prior to apprehending a criminal.'  
An you might have realized, the statement that this option makes is true, but the conclusion that it makes can't be inferred from the sentence in the example alone, so it is incorrect for the purposes of this example.  In order to find the correct answer, you need to base your conclusion off of what is in the passage and not on what you know to be true.