Three experiments examined answer selection within the framework of a psychological model of question answering proposed by Graesser and Franklin (1990). The model, called QUEST, specifies how knowledge structures are searched during question answering. In Experiment 1, participants provided “goodness of answer” ratings to “why”‐, “how”‐, and “what is the consequence” (CONS) questions about recently read expository passages. Participants rated answers to questions generated from QUEST (i.e., “legal” answers) as being better answers than those not generated by QUEST (i.e., “illegal” answers). A priming‐recognition task (Experiment 2) and a lexical decision task (Experiment 3) were used to examine whether both legal and illegal answers were activated during the search process or only the legal answers. Participants recognized statements and provided lexical decisions more quickly if the targets represented legal answers to a preceding prime question than if they represented illegal answers, suggesting that the search progressed primarily along legal arcs. However, this pattern only occurred for why‐questions, and not for how‐ and CONS‐questions. The studies provided additional support for QUEST'S arc‐search procedures associated with why‐ and how‐questions in the context of natural expository texts.