Most people who look at this item on page 1 will identify infirm dependants and quickly decide that they have none, a simple match on one phrase. People who have ‘infirm dependants,’ will also have to consider whether they are, ‘related’ and ‘over 18,’ a more complex task.

In section 4 respondents have to further limit ‘related to’ to only those ‘related by blood or marriage,’ as in ‘child, parent, uncle,’ etc. This prose processing task asks the form-filler to carry out a number of cycles to locate conditions to be met and then integrate, or compare, his or her personal circumstances (given information) with this set of conditions. Because the task depends on reading a text passage, it is rated on the type of match for prose processing rubric. It is an integration task (3); requiring comparison (+0); searching on 3 phrases (+2); one item response (yes/ no) (+0); match requires low text-based inference (infirmity) (+1); no new information frame (+0); total rating of 6 for ‘type of match.’ The type of information requested is an action (2). There are no distractors.

The calculation needed if the form-filler has a dependent who meets all the conditions for an infirm dependent is a series of three quantitative tasks or operations. The first is to subtract the dependent’s net income from 7,131. As discussed in the ‘Spousal Amount’ section, this subtraction is not particularly difficult. (The only thing we can do to make the operation easier would be to round the base amount to $7,100. or $7,000 to make the arithmetic somewhat simpler.)

Next, the result of the first operation is compared to $2,353, an integration task. On the ‘type of match’ for document processing, this task would be rated as follows: integration (3); compare (+0); one feature match (+0); one response (+0); literal given (+0); literal requested (+0); total rating 3. The type of information requested is an amount (2). No distractors. (You might want to compare this operation with a similar operation in section 6 where it is set up as a subtraction.)