fact and opinion

Fact and opinion is the sorting skill under ATI's R.2.1: a stated fact is a statement a reader could check against a record — what was done, what it cost, how many, when — and an opinion is a judgment, a recommendation or the writer's own unverifiable claim about what someone else knows or intends. The subject does not decide which it is. One sentence has a fact half and an opinion half: the board moved the money to a road project reports an event, and that was the wrong call judges it. The tells are the verb and the adjective — should, wrong, stubborn, overdue, reckless — and the clause that announces what a third party thinks (the commission knows it). Three things are worth naming. A statement can be false and still count as a fact here, because the test is whether it can be checked. An opinion often wraps a fact, as spending a sidewalk's money on lamps was reckless contains the spending. And on a fact-or-opinion item the most tempting wrong option is usually one of the passage's own true facts, offered where the question asked for a judgment.