SAT Prep Black Book: The Most Effective SAT Strategies Ever Published (12 page)

Between the answers with “
uncertainty” and “doubt,” we would want to see that “despair” doesn’t describe anything in the text. The text does say that Africa “left its mark” on the people being described, and that the world is forced to take note of Africans and African-Americans, which is a demonstration of the author’s “pride.” So (E) is correct.

Test-takers miss this one frequently because they think “personal anecdotes” is the answer, but the author never relays a
personal
story, so (D) is wrong. (B), on the other hand, is right, because the author repeatedly refers generally to all Africans and all African-Americans as though they were all the same.

(C) is another wrong answer that often attracts a lot of test-takers. The text does mention some things in the past tense, but it doesn’t give specific historical facts like “in 1492 Columbus captained three ships bound West from Spain.” Instead, we have only broad, figurative statements like “for centuries, we have gazed at one another
across the transatlantic divide.”

(C) is correct because the popular appeal is mentioned in the first paragraph of Passage 1, which calls the
Mona Lisa
the “world’s most famous portrait,” and because Passage 2 says that the passage is “famous” in line 44 and in other places, and talks about its “renown” in line 67.

Some test-takers incorrectly choose (D) because the first passage talks about how the
Mona Lisa
was the first painting to include many features that were later adopted in other paintings (lines 10 through 15), and the second passage talks about how the painting captured the attention of Clarke and Barolsky. But Clarke and Barolsky are not described as
artists
in the second passage, and the answer (D) refers specifically to the painting’s influence on
artists
, not on critics and historians.

For questions like this one, students often get frustrated because they feel it’s impossible to find something stated directly in the text when we’re asked what the author of one passage would have said about the other. But remember that, even in these situations, the correct answer is stated directly somewhere.

The phenomena in Passage 1 are the giant crowds
of people that turned out to see the painting, and in line 68 the author of Passage 2 says that “people, institutions, processes . . . have turned the
Mona Lisa
into the best-known painting in the world.” (A) restates this exactly, and no other choice does.

(B) is an answer choice that a lot of students will be
attracted to, because it sounds like a decent interpretation that you could defend in a classroom discussion. But it’s wrong because the author of passage 2 doesn’t say anything about the true importance of the painting.

(A) doesn’t work because the passage never actually says that the painting is beautiful, or that the woman’s appearance was normal. Many test-takers will like this wrong answer because they personally believe the painting is beautiful or that the woman herself was normal in appearance, but we always have to remember that we’re looking for an answer choice that appears directly in the text, not for a choice that matches our own interpretation.

(B) d
oesn’t work because the passage doesn’t say anything about the portrait’s monetary value.

(C) d
oesn’t work because of “untimely demise.”

(D) d
oesn’t work because the text doesn’t mention a lack of charisma.

(E) is correct
because “ordinary status” goes with “nobody special,” and “set the standard for painting” goes with “aesthetic significance.”

The text says that Leonardo is describing the effect of the technique in the sentence that begins on line 23, so (B) is correct. None of the other choices is spelled out in the text anywhere.

Again, even though the question is asking what one author would say about another author’s work, which seems like a fairly subjective question to ask, the correct answer must be stated directly in the text. Passage 2 mentions “features” that bring “instant recognition.” The only feature mentioned in Passage 1 is the “famous smile” in the last line, so the correct answer is (A). Note that “famous” in passage 1 goes with “brings instant recognition” in passage 2.

While each of the answer choices could be a synonym for the word “position” in a particular context, the correct answer will be the only one that restates something from the passage itself. Let’s trace the word “position” back through the text and see what happens.

The sentence that contains the word “position” equates that word with the pronoun “it” in the beginning of the sentence. The word “it” is referring back to the phrase “this idea” from the previous sentence. The phrase “this idea” is referring back to what the historians “argue” in line 38. So the word “position” is ultimately being equated with what people “argue” in line 38, which means the correct answer is that it’s a “view
.” So (D) is correct here.

Some students incorrectly choose “policy,” but a policy isn’t the same thing as an opinion or view—a policy is a standard way of handling a particular situation, not a belief. As always, it’s very critical to think about exactly what each word specifically means, so you don’t end up choosing a wrong answer just because it’s somewhat close to the text.

Both people say that the painting seems three-dimensional. Passage 1 mentions this in lines 22 and 23, while Barolsky mentions the creation of “depth.” So (E) is the answer.

A lot of students get this one wrong, though.

(B) is a very popular wrong answer, because students often overlook the word “unduly.” Nobody ever mentions whether the painting deserves its recognition, so that single word makes the entire answer choice wrong.

(C) is reflected in the first passage, but Barolsky never specifically mentions any influence on other artists, so (C) doesn’t work.

(D) is close to something in passage 1, but it’s not reflected in Barolsky’s remark at all.

When we see unattributed quotation marks in a reading question, they are almost always serving to call the meaning of the quoted word into question. So (E) is the correct answer here.

(A) d
oesn’t work because the first passage doesn’t focus on the smile, and the second passage doesn’t focus on mystery.

(B) i
s also totally irrelevant.

(C) i
s correct because the first passage mentions the original techniques that Leonardo used to create the illusion of depth, while the second passage talks about the reasons why the painting is so famous.

(D) i
s wrong because the first text doesn’t speculate on the life of the subject. It only briefly mentions her probable identity. The second passage doesn’t reject art history, either—in fact, the author considers himself to be “like most historians” in line 66.

(E) i
s wrong because, among other things, the second text doesn’t debate the artistic merits of the painting. It does quote Barolsky’s comment on Leonardo’s technique, but it never offers an opposing viewpoint on that technique, so there is no debate.

By now you should have a pretty strong idea of the proper application of the Passage-Based Reading strategies. Remember at all times that the critical element for all questions is to find the correct answer directly on the page, in black and white, with no inference or interpretation. Remember that it will often be necessary to read very carefully and make fine distinctions among the exact meanings of particular words in order to distinguish wrong answers from right answers.

             
Now that we’ve gone through a section of Passage-Based Reading questions, let’s take a look at a sample of some of the more challenging questions from the College Board’s Blue Book, the
Official SAT Study Guide
.

These questions are some of the ones that students have asked me about the most over the years. Like all Passage-Based Reading questions,
they can be answered correctly and with total certainty if we read the text and the answer choices very carefully and follow the rules of the SAT. So it’s not that these questions do anything differently from the questions that are less challenging; it’s just that they are sometimes a bit more subtle about what they’re doing.

(
If you would like to see some video demonstrations of these ideas, go to
www.SATprepVideos.com
for a selection of demonstration videos that are free to readers of this book.
)

As with other question explanations in this book, you’ll need a copy of the College Board’s
Blue Book to follow along. Let’s get started—and remember, these questions are generally among the ones that other students have struggled with most, so don’t worry that every question on the test will be as challenging as these are.

I highly recommend that you follow along with these solutions as a way to continue to improve your understanding of Passage-Based Reading questions and how to answer them.

This is one of those questions that asks us how the author of one passage would respond to an idea from
another passage. As always, we’ll answer it by looking directly in the text.

The enthusiasm in the second passage is felt with regard to “the mechanization that he saw around him” in line 13.
So we need to find something in the first passage that mentions an idea related to mechanization or enthusiasm.

Passage 1 talks about “the forces of industrialization and urbanization,” which is essentially the same idea in this context as the “mechanization” referred to in the second passage. So let’s take a look and see what the first passage has to say about the “industrialization and urbanization.”

It says that Americans “protested the intrusion” of “industrialization and urbanization.” In other words, they didn’t like it—by definition, if you “protest” something, you must be against it. Passage 1 also says that Thoreau’s book is “an illustration of the intensity” of that protest. Along the same lines, the earlier part of the text calls Thoreau the “epitome” of this anti-industrial protest. So Thoreau is the embodiment (the “epitome” and “illustration”) of this protest.

Passage 2, though, said that Thoreau was sometimes “enthusiastic” about the mechanization.

This goes with choice (E), which says that Thoreau’s enthusiasm was at odds with what people thought about his attitudes. Again, the first passage says that people see Thoreau as the epitome of an anti-industrial feeling, but the second passage says he was sometimes enthusiastic about it. So (E) is correct.

The other answer choices don’t work for a variety of reasons. (B) is the direct contradiction of what passage 1 says. So is (C). (D) might be an interesting interpretation, but the text never says anything about Thoreau’s feelings being shaped by his experiment.

To understand why (C) is the correct answer here, we need to know about a certain stylistic construction in English that many students are unaware of: in English, if we say that something is “as X as it is Y,” we mean that it is
very
X and
very
Y, not just that it is equally X and Y.

For instance, if I said “that dog is as beautiful as he is smart,” I don’t just mean that the dog is equally beautiful and smart—I’m not saying that he’s kind of rough-looking and also pretty stupid. I’m saying that he’s extremely beautiful and also extremely smart. So this construction doesn’t just indicate equality between two attributes; it also indicates
an abundance of both attributes.

For this reason, when the text says something is “as widespread as it is wrong,” it’s emphasizing that the widespread-ness and the wrong-ness are both extreme. This is why the answer is (C). We might like to think of this as one of those “demonstration” kinds of questions I mentioned earlier, in which the specific structure of the relevant text indicates the answer. But, again, in order to get this, we have to be familiar with the “as X as it is Y” construction, and a lot of students just aren’t.

But don’t worry about this question too much. For one thing, if you ever happen to see another SAT question about a phrase in the “as X as it is Y” structure, you’ll know what to do. But, more importantly, you’re probably never going to see another real SAT question exactly like this. As I mentioned earlier, these “demonstration” questions are pretty rare.

The other choices don’t work because nothing in the text indicates that the author is wistful, dismayed, ambivalent, or apologetic.

This difficult question combines two challenging elements. First, we have to realize that it’s actually Lewis’s remark that illustrates for us what Bobby is saying, because the two ideas are stated in succession and joined by the word “and” at the beginning of Lewis’s quote (remember that the College Board treats two ideas stated in this way as though they were synonyms). Second, we have to realize that Lewis’s remark can be considered humorous by the College Board because it can’t be taken literally.

Lewis says that people who lie down until a feeling passes will be in the cemetery before they think about getting up. There are two ways to take this statement, and both are impossible: Either he means that people will be dead and buried in the cemetery and then think about getting up, or he means that they will lie down somewhere else and somehow be transported to the cemetery without getting up. Either interpretation is logically impossible, so the College Board can refer to this remark as a humorous one, meaning that the answer is (C).

On top of that, the phrase can be taken as a ‘synonym’ of Bobby’s remark because Lewis begins his remark with the word “and.”

This is one of the more challenging questions in the book, in my opinion. But, as always, we can still find a reliable answer if we stick to the rules of the test that were previously explained in this book, and read the text carefully.

This is one of the questions we mentioned in the discussion of “demonstration” questions. Here, the phrase “captured the dim silver glow of street lamps, bounced against sidewalks in glistening sparks, then disappeared like tiny ephemeral jewels” is a direct example of the “vivid imagery” mentioned in choice (B), because “imagery” means “visually descriptive language,” and those phrases are visual descriptions. So (B) is correct.

Some students choose (C) incorrectly here—the wording of these phrases doesn’t satisfy the College Board’s requirement
for “humorous” texts, because it doesn’t describe something that can’t be taken literally. It’s possible for streetlights to have a “dim silver glow,” and it’s possible for raindrops to bounce and glisten, and it’s possible for them to be
like
jewels—notice the text doesn’t say raindrops
are
jewels, which would be impossible; it says they are “
like
jewels” (emphasis mine).

This question is just one more example of how important it is to read everything very carefully and to keep the unwritten rules of the SAT firmly in your mind when you work on these questions.

Students often miss this question because they don’t catch
the connection between the phrase “robust media profits” in line 15 and the phrase “economic well-being” in choice (E), which is the correct answer. If we say that something is “robust,” we mean that it’s strong, healthy, functional, et cetera. So if profits are robust, there is economic well-being.

(A) doesn’t work because the idea of “core values” only appears in the first passage, but we were asked to find something that was only in the second passage. This is a classic type of wrong answer for a question that asks us to find something from one passage but not the other, and something you definitely have to look out for—simply misreading “passage 2” as “passage 1” or vice versa could lead you to believe that this choice was valid.

(B) doesn’t work because both texts specifically mention Rosensteil.

(C) doesn’t work because the second passage doesn’t mention the history of journalism.

(D) doesn’t work because sensationalism appears in both passages.

Like many challenging Passage-Based Reading question, this one is difficult because we have to read very carefully, not because we have to make any kind of inference or have very advanced vocabularies.

First, we need to look carefully to see what the text says “scientists originally thought.” We see that what they originally thought was “that the purpose of yawning was to increase the amount of oxygen in the blood or to release some accumulated carbon dioxide.”

The question asks us to find the answer choice that disproves what scientists originally thought, so we have to find the choice that disproves the idea that people yawn to increase oxygen in their blood or to release carbon dioxide.

(A) might look promising at first, because it mentions carbon dioxide and breathing rates
, which appear together in the sentence that runs from lines 49 to 52.

(B) is irrelevant because it mentions sleep, and the text doesn’t say that scientists originally thought yawning had anything to do with sleep. The text just says they thought it had to do with oxygen or carbon dioxide.

(C) would be
supporting
what scientists originally thought: they originally thought that yawning was a mechanism to increase the amount of oxygen in the blood, and this choice says exactly that. This is a classic example of a wrong answer that does exactly the opposite of what we were asked to do. The College Board includes these types of wrong answers because they know that some students will get sort of ‘turned around’ if they’re asked to contradict something, and accidentally end up restating it.

(D) would tend to disprove what scientists thought. The text says that scientists thought people yawned because they needed to increase their blood oxygen; this choice points out that people don’t yawn very much in places where the oxygen is low. If what the scientists originally thought were correct, we would expect people in low-oxygen environments to yawn a lot, so they would get more oxygen into their blood.

(E) would also support what scientists originally thought, just like (C). One of the things that scientists originally thought was that yawning was a way to release carbon dioxide, and this choice says people yawn more when their carbon dioxide levels are higher.

So on a first read-through, you might end up kind of liking both (A) and (D). Now it’s time to scrutinize those two choices and see which one ends up working, and which one has a flaw. (A) talks about
breathing rates
, but the text only tells us what scientists thought about
yawning
. The idea of breathing faster is mentioned later in the paragraph, but not as part of what “scientists originally thought” in line 46. So now we have to ask ourselves whether a breathing rate is the same thing as a yawn. The answer is no, it isn’t. While yawning might be related to breathing rates if we tried to force ourselves to see a connection between them, the fact remains that the text says scientists had a belief about the purpose of yawning, not a belief about how anything affected the breathing rate
per se
. So, after careful consideration, we see that (A) was never actually a direct fit with the text, while (D) talks about people in a low-oxygen environment not yawning a lot, which would contradict the idea that people yawn because they need more oxygen. So (D) is the correct answer.

This is one of the questions that students ask about more than any other. Most people who answer it incorrectly choose (E). The paragraph does describe the author’s childhood artistic endeavors, and the author’s desire to be a “Renaissance artist,” but the text does not specifically say that it was the wish to be a Renaissance artist that led to a “devotion to visual arts.” There are at least two major problems with this phrase.

First, t
he author indicates that he was drawing and painting before he began writing poems, and he seems to be equating writing poems with the desire to be a Renaissance artist, so that desire can’t be the thing that “initiated a devotion to the visual arts,” since he was already devoted to the visual arts before he had the desire to write poems.