SAT Prep Black Book: The Most Effective SAT Strategies Ever Published (16 page)

Some people also like the choice “confusion,” because the text says the clerk “thought . . . he heard other” “words.” But the rest of the text in that sentence doesn’t describe someone being confused or unsure of himself; it describes someone feeling an emotion in
response to watching someone else be tormented. When the text says that the clerk thought he heard other words, then, it means that the clerk was so moved that he
felt
as though Akakyevitch were crying out “I am your brother.” This is the only way to read the text that makes the rest of the sentence have any coherent meaning.

The College Board often asks us about the function of quotation marks in a passage. If quotation marks are used in an SAT passage without the quote being attributed to a specific source, then they are being used to show that the author doesn’t completely agree with the way someone else would use a particular word. Think of these quotation marks like the “air-quotes” that people sometimes make with their fingers while they’re speaking, to show that they’re using a word or phrase in a way that they might not personally agree with.

In this case, the authors of both passages are showing that they don’t agree with the common uses of the words “frees,” “verbs,” “nouns,” “stealing,” or “property”
in the contexts in which they are used in these passages. So the correct answer is (D).

Remember that when the SAT asks about
the usage of quotation marks for unattributed quotes, the correct answer will involve the idea that the author does not agree with the common usages of the phrases in quotes.

A lot of test-takers miss this question because they make the mistake of trying to analyze the text. But if we adopt the more passive, reactive approach of simply checking through the answer choices to see which one is supported by the text, we’ll find the answer with much less difficulty.

(A) doesn’t work because no actual “event” is being “dramatized” here. In other words, the joke isn’t describing anything that actually happened—jokes, by their nature, are fictional.

(B) doesn’t work because there is no particular point being argued
within or by the joke itself
. The essay as a whole is arguing a point, as all essays do, but the joke isn’t arguing a point by itself. Since the question asked us about the role of the joke in the passage, and not about the role of the passage overall, (B) is wrong.

(C) is the correct answer because the text says, in line
33, that the joke “allows me to jump right into an idea . . .” The idea that the author can now “jump right into” after telling the joke is the “topic” being “introduc[ed]” in the answer choice.

(D) is wrong because the joke doesn’t involve defining any terms.

(E) is wrong because of the word “misleading,” among other things. It’s true that the end of the joke does involve the word “assume,” and it’s true that cows aren’t spherical, but the text itself never says that the assumption is “misleading.” This is yet another example of how careful we have to be not to impose our own interpretation on the text; in order for this answer choice to be correct, the text would have to say directly that the assumption was false or misleading. Since it doesn’t say that, (E) is wrong.

Of all the questions in the “Trabb’s boy” passage, this is the one that students ask about the most often. Many of them get caught up in the phrase “pervasive comic strategy” in the question prompt, because they don’t feel like they know what that phrase means. But we can actually work around that phrase by remembering that the correct answer must reflect something that appears directly in the text. So let’s go through the answer choices and see what we have:

(A) can’t work because the onlooking townspeople don’t say anything
in the entire passage.

(B) works because the author says his “position was a distinguished one” in line 9, which indicates that he had a sense of dignity, and because Trabb’s boy is clearly engaging in what we might call “antics.”
So (B) is correct.

(C) is wrong because the author never says that he didn’t understand anything.

(D) doesn’t work because the text doesn’t invoke fate to “rationalize human faults.” The text does mention “fate” in the first paragraph, but there’s no rationalization of anything. In other words, there is no attempt by the author to explain something away by relying on, or referring to, fate.

(E) doesn’t work because the townspeople are ridiculing the author, not the boy. This is another example of how the College Board
likes to create wrong answers that involve major concepts from the text but don’t reflect the correct relationships among those concepts.

This is another question that asks us how the author of one passage might respond to something from another passage. As always, we’ll find the answer spelled out directly in the text.

The academic historians in the first passage “have not given
[Williamsburg] the significance it deserves,” according to lines 8 and 9, and have “dismiss[ed] it” and seen it as “harmless but amusing.”

But, starting in line 82, the author of passage 2 says that Williamsburg is a “crime against art and history” that is evidence of “an established element of popular culture” that “has also given a license to destroy.”

Choice (E) is correct then. The phrase “fail to take seriously” in the answer choice goes with the phrases “dismiss” and “harmless but amusing” in passage 1. The phrase “damage done” in the answer choice goes with the idea of the “license to destroy” in passage 2. The phrase “cultural trend” in the answer choice goes with the phrase “established element of popular culture” in passage 2.

(A) is incorrect because the academics in passage 1 never say anything about ho
w much history can be learned.

(B) is incorrect because the author of passage 2 also thinks the environments are an “established element of popular culture.”

(C) doesn’t work because the academics don’t say anything about the necessity of simplifying history.

(D) doesn’t work because the academics don’t endorse anything.

Now that we’ve gone through a lot of these Passage-Based Reading questions, you’re probably beginning to be able to find the correct answers pretty reliably. Your abilities will improve with practice, especially when you have to figure out questions that seem challenging at first. Hang in there, and keep the rules of the test in mind!

If you’d like to see a selection of free video solutions to help you keep improving, then check out
www.SATprepVideos.com
.

This is a one-page summary of the major relevant concepts. Use it to evaluate your comprehension
or jog your memory. For a more in-depth treatment of these ideas, see the rest of the section.

The Big Secret:
The answer to every question comes directly from what’s on the page.
No interpretation whatsoever.

The rules for Passage-Based Reading on the SAT are simple;
the only challenging thing is making sure you follow them all the time, no matter what.
Here they are:

o
Correct answers are always directly supported in the text.

o
Don't overlook details
. The difference between right and wrong is often just one word.

o
Remember there is always exactly one right answer per question.

Here are the most
common wrong-answer patterns
you'll see:

o
Answer choice contains statements that
go beyond what is mentioned in the text.

o
Answer choice mentions concepts from the text but
confuses the relationship
between them.

o
Answer choice is
completely irrelevant
to the text.

o
Answer choice
says the opposite
of what the text says.

o
Answer choice would be a
decent interpretation
if you were in a literature class.

Here's the
general Passage-Based Reading process:

o
Skim or read the passage (whichever you’re more comfortable with). Or even skip it altogether.

o
Read the question and note any citation.

o
Read the relevant portion of the text (the citation if there is one, otherwise the part that has similar concepts to the question).

o
Find four wrong-answer choices (look for wrong-answer patterns).

o
Confirm remaining answer choice.

o
Mark the correct answer.

o
Save general passage questions for last.

Special notes:

Two consecutive statements in a passage should be treated like synonyms
if the College Board asks about them.
If they have a negating word like “not” or “never” between them, then they should be treated like antonyms.

The words
“metaphor” and “humor” in an answer choice refer to a non-literal phrase
in the passage.

The word
“irony” refers to a contradiction
.

If you think 2 or more answer choices are equally valid, then you’re overlooking some small detail.

See the many example solutions in this Black Book for demonstrations of these principles.

“Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together.
”
- William Hazlitt

When talking about the Reading section of the SAT, most tutors and courses prefer to start with the Sentence Completion questions. This is because most people hold two incorrect beliefs about the SAT Critical Reading section:

o
They think that students will improve significantly if they simply memorize enough vocabulary words, and

o
they think that improvement on the Passage-Based Reading questions is impossible for most students, because they don’t realize how those questions work.

But, as usual, we do things differently in the Black Book. Y
ou’ll notice that I started with a discussion of Passage-Based Reading questions. There are also two reasons for this:

o
The central concept that we use in solving Passage-Based Reading questions, which is the idea that the correct answer must restate something directly in the passage, still applies to the Sentence Completion questions, and

o
many years of experience have taught me that most students have an easier time grasping that idea in the Passage-Based Reading questions than they do in the Sentence Completion questions.

There are two
main types of Sentence Completion questions, and they’re very similar to each other. The first type is the Single-Blank question, and the second is the Double-Blank question. The only difference between them is that the first type asks you to fill in one blank, and the second type asks you to fill in two blanks. You use basically the same process to answer either question type, but the two-blank questions sometimes allow room for a little more creativity on your part.

In this section, we’ll go over the ways that natural test-takers find the answers to Sentence Com
pletion questions, including an explanation of why memorizing vocabulary is generally not the best way to prepare.

More importantly, we’ll talk about what you should actually do if you want to improve your performance on these questions.

Most students try to approach SAT Sentence Completion questions by memorizing hundreds
, or even thousands, of vocabulary words. This is a terrible idea, left over from the days when the SAT had analogies and antonyms on it (it was a terrible idea even then, but it’s an even worse idea now).

Even though there’s a whole industry built around teaching SAT vocabulary to high school students, there are a lot of problems with
the idea of cramming vocab in order to raise your SAT score. Let’s take a look at some of them now.

Because most people never stop to think about the SAT from the College Board’s standpoint, it never dawns on them that the Sentence Completion format is actually a really bad one if you’re trying to evaluate somebody’s vocabulary. If the College Board wanted to measure vocabulary knowledge in the most simple and direct way possible, it could have simply created a question format in which it would provide a single word as the prompt, and then five potential definitions as answer choices, and asked you to select the correct definition for the word in the prompt. That would be a much more direct test of your vocabulary knowledge. Instead, the Sentence Completion format gives you a variety of potential clues and connections to make, both within the sentence and among the answer choices.

Further, most students will find that they know all the necessary words to answer at least half of these questions, and possibly nearly all of them, without feeling like they’re going outside of their comfort zone in terms of vocabulary. Why would the College Board include questions with these kinds of simple words if the goal were purely to test your vocabulary? For that matter,
back when the College Board dropped the analogies from this part of the test in 2005, why did they change the name of this section from the “Verbal” section to the “Critical Reading” section? In my opinion, the most likely answer to all of these questions is that the College Board recognizes there’s a lot more going on here than just vocabulary knowledge.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I agree that, all things being equal, it would be more helpful on these questions to have a larger vocabulary than a smaller vocabulary. I also agree that there are sometimes questions (often the last question or two in a page of Sentence Completion questions) that would definitely be easier if
you knew all the words in the answer choices.

But even recognizing the existence of the more vocabulary-intensive questions forces us to admit that the rest of the questions just aren’t
like that. And even in the more vocabulary-intensive questions, the more challenging words tend to involve multiple syllables, and they also tend to be derived from, or similar to, words from Latin, French, or Spanish, or even popular brand names. In other words, they’re often (not always, but often) words that students have a fighting chance at figuring out.

If the College Board wanted to test vocabulary directly, it would use single-syllable words
derived from sources that were less likely to be familiar to test-takers, like “dun” or “kith.” The potential meanings of these kinds of words would be nearly impossible to figure out unless a student already knew them.

Despite what students seem to think, and despite what many test prep companies want you to believe, the SAT does not appear to be standardized for vocabulary.

In other words, we won’t find the same set of challenging words being used over and over again on the Critical Reading part of the SAT. It’s not as thou
gh there is a list of 200 words that the College Board consistently draws from when creating Sentence Completion questions. If there were, then it might be a good strategy just to invest our time in learning that list of words.

This is why the companies that sell you vocabulary lists must constantly update the lists they publish to reflect the words that have appeared on the most recent tests. If the College Board were sticking to a standardized list of vocabulary words, those commercial lists wouldn’t need to be updated every year. But it doesn’t, so they do.

Even the so-called “high-frequency” SAT lists demonstrate the lack of standardization on the test. Many companies sell a list of hundreds of “high-frequency” SAT words for students to memorize. If we accept the idea that there are 500 “high-frequency” words (which is already a little odd, since each test only has approximately 150 words that appear in answer choices for Sentence Completion questions, and a large portion of those words are pretty common words), how many “low-frequency” words would we expect? Another 500? One thousand? If we apply the Pareto principle we might expect that there could be another 2,000 potential “low-frequency” words.

Contrast this situation with the idea of preparing for the Math or Writing sections. Both of those sections are clearly standardized for a defined set of relevant principles that the test-taker is clearly supposed to know. On the Math section, students clearly need to know how to solve for a variable, the sum of the degree measurements in the angles of a triangle, and so on. On the Writing section, students need to kn
ow about subject-verb agreement, dangling modifiers, and other clearly defined principles of grammar and style. If you were to write books explaining all the math and writing concepts that were necessary for the Math and Writing section of the current version of the SAT, you would literally
never
need to update them (assuming you did a thorough job in the beginning) because the concepts that are tested in the Math and Writing section
literally never change
. That’s the whole purpose of standardizing a test.

But the commercial vocabulary lists need constant updating, because the same words don’t appear over and over again on each SAT. Can it be that the College Board, which did such a good job of standardizing its Math and Writing subject matter, just forgot how to standardize stuff when it created its so-called “vocabulary” test? Of course not. The much simpler explanation is that the Sentence Completion questions were never intended as a vocabulary test in the first place.

We just discussed the idea that some test prep companies sell lists of so-called “high-frequency” words that appear on the SAT, which might imply the existence of as many as 2
,500 challenging words in total that could appear on any particular SAT. Those are fairly large numbers.

T
hey seem even larger when we think about how many challenging words a test-taker is even likely to encounter on any given test, and how many of those challenging words she actually needs to know in order to answer a question correctly.

But it’s also important to remember that
most challenging words are irrelevant to the test
. In other words, for every Sentence Completion question on the SAT, it’s actually possible to arrive at the correct answer knowing
only the correct answer choice
. In some two-blank questions (definitely not all, but some), it’s possible to figure out the correct answer if we only know one of the ten words in the answer choices. It’s sometimes possible to figure out a correct answer choice by eliminating other choices that we might be more familiar with, even if we don’t actually know the meaning of the correct answer choice. And so on—we’ll see many actual examples of this a little later in this book.

In my experience
, after having worked with tens of thousands of students from a variety of educational backgrounds and through a variety of media and formats, I can say that, on average, most test-takers will encounter somewhere between 2 and 8 questions per test in which challenging vocabulary actually poses a serious obstacle.

So we’d be potentially talking about memorizing anywhere from hundreds to thousands of words in order to have a better chance—hopefully—of answering maybe a half-dozen questions or so on the actual day of the test.
When we consider that there are so many easier, more reliable ways of improving performance on other areas of the test, it’s a little ridiculous, in my opinion, to devote all that memorization effort to the hope that it
might
help us answer 6 more questions correctly.

And that reminds me—there’s
no guarantee that the words you memorize will actually be the words that trouble you on test day, because the test isn’t standardized for vocabulary anyway.

More times than I could possibly count, I have seen people miss Sentence Completion questions even when they knew all of the necessary words. This tends to happen for two reasons: either the person didn’t know how Sentence Completion questions on the SAT were designed, or the person didn’t read the question carefully enough. (Remember: it’s not by accident that the College Board calls the part of the test with the Sentence Completion questions the “Critical Reading” section.)

I have also seen students find clever ways to work around holes in their vocabulary, in order to find correct answers with certainty, even when they might not have known all (or any) of the words in the answer choices before answering the question. This can’t be done in every case, of course, but it can be done much more
often than most people think.

The prevalence of both types of scenarios (people missing questions when they know the words, and people getting questions right when they don’t know all the words) strongly supports the idea that these questions are not primarily about vocabulary
, and that memorizing definitions is generally a waste of time and energy, at least for the SAT.

A lot of people don’t realize this, but the “curve” on the Critical Reading section is
typically much more generous than the one on the Math section. Often, you can miss a question (sometimes even 2) and still have a “perfect” 800 on the section. In fact, if your goal is to be above a 750, your cushion might be a handful of questions. If you want to be in the 650+ range, you can often omit a dozen or so questions, assuming all of the answers you do mark are correct.

So it’s not the case that you’ll need to answer every single Sentence Completion question correctly in order to have any hope of an elite score on this section of the test.

One of the dirty little secrets of the vocabulary business is that forced memorization doesn’t usually help people learn vocabulary anyway—at least, not in an ideal way.

Time after time, I’ve had students remark to me that they know they memorized the definition of a particular word once, but they can no longer recall what it means. Sometimes, even when they do think they recall a word’s definition, they’re wrong—either because they’re remembering incorrectly, or because the definition they memorized was incorrect or inexact in the first place.

This happens because our brains aren’t designed to think of the words in our vocabularies as entries in a database, as things that can be memorized efficiently from flashcards. Think about the words that you feel comfortable with, and how you learned them. Nobody ever sat you down and taught you the word “table” with a flashcard. You learned the word “table” by living in and around people who used the word consistently and correctly, and you automatically picked up its meaning because that’s what your brain was designed to do: extract the meaning
of a particular word through repeated exposure in its correct context. Think about all the other words and phrases you’ve probably learned over the past few weeks or months: nicknames for celebrities, the names of popular dances, specialized techniques for playing an instrument or a video game, who knows what. In every case, I’m willing to bet that you learned these words without giving them much thought. You just picked them up because they were constantly around you, and because
you actually cared what they meant
.

Now contrast this with the plight of someone trying to memorize the definition of the word “ameliorate” off the back of a flashcard. The context is gone. The exposure is limited and artif
icial. And, more importantly, you have no real interest in it—if you really cared what the word “ameliorate” meant, you’d probably know it already. No real learning is going to happen in that situation.

I’m not saying you can’t force yourself to remember a list of definitions and then recall those definitions when presented with the appropriate words. I’m not even saying that you can’t do that with 5,000 words if you feel like it, or more. You totally can. People do it all the time.

I’m just saying that these feats of memorization aren’t really the same thing as actually knowing how to use the words you’re studying.

I’ve seen this kind of artificial memorization cause a lot of problems for a lot of people. Perhaps the most extreme example was a student who wrote
in an essay that something happened “for the inaugural interval in 20 years,” instead of writing “for the first time in 20 years,” because he had memorized that “inaugural” meant “first,” and that “interval” meant “time.” More subtly, and more problematically, I’ve seen students answer Sentence Completion questions incorrectly because they had memorized an incorrect, misleading, or inadequate “definition” of a particular term.