Anatomy of a five-part explanation
A multiple-choice question teaches you almost nothing on its own. You pick an answer, you find out if you were right, and unless the explanation does some real work, that is where it ends. So the explanation is where we spend most of the effort, and every one in the bank follows the same five-part structure.
1. The bottom line
One or two sentences you could carry straight into the exam. Not a summary of the explanation, the distilled decision rule: when you see this presentation, this is the move. If a candidate reads nothing else, the bottom line still has to be worth the click.
2. Why the key is right
The positive case for the correct answer, argued from mechanism or guideline rather than asserted. “Synchronised cardioversion, because the patient is unstable” is a fact. Explaining what makes instability the branch point, and why the unstable branch skips the pharmacology entirely, is teaching. This section is where the question earns the right to be more than recall.
3. Why each distractor is wrong
Every wrong option gets its own line, because every wrong option was chosen for a reason. A good distractor is a real decision a reasonable registrar might make one step too early, one patient group across, or one guideline revision ago. Naming exactly why it fails is often more valuable than the key itself: those margins are where exam marks actually live. (We have written more about this in what makes a fair distractor.)
4. The Australasian source
Every explanation cites a named local reference: Therapeutic Guidelines, ANZCOR, a state health pathway, the local literature. This is partly about trust, you can check us, and partly about the exam itself, which is set in Australasian practice. A citation to the source the examiners actually use means nothing needs re-translating on the day. The full argument is in why Australasian referencing matters.
5. The figure
Where a question turns on something visual, an ECG, an anatomical relationship, a procedural setup, the explanation ships with a purpose-drawn figure card rather than a paragraph doing an image’s job. Image questions wait for their figure before they are released into the bank at all; a visual question without its visual is half a question.
Why the structure is fixed
A fixed structure keeps us honest. If a draft cannot fill all five parts, if there is no clean bottom line, or a distractor cannot be defended as a fair near-miss, the question is not finished, and the structure exposes it before a candidate ever sees it.
You can inspect the structure yourself: every question in the free samples carries its full five-part explanation.