SAT For Dummies. Ron Woldoff

When does this strategy fail? When you go straight for the answer choices without thinking of your own answer first. What happens then is that you get caught in the trap of wrong answers, where you read each answer and think, “Maybe that’s it,” and spend all this time going back and forth to the passage. Don’t do that.

Also, don’t doubt your own answer when you read the answer choices. Sure, the correct answer knows the depth and detail better than you — but so do the three wrong answers! Trust yourself to answer the question well enough! No matter how far off your answer is, it’ll be close enough to cross off three wrong answers.

       No one gets a perfect score on the SAT Reading Test, so don’t kill yourself trying to. It’s okay to miss a question here and there — but it’s not okay to spend five minutes on one question.

Answering the Best-Evidence Questions

      Here’s one for you. You get a vague inference question. By following the preceding strategies, you answer the question yourself, and then you use your own answer to cross off the three way-wrong answer choices and go with the remaining fourth answer. You don’t really trust this fourth answer, but it has to be right, because the other three are so far off. And it is.

      Next question. “Which choice provides the best evidence for the answer to the previous question?” Wait, what? You’re supposed to be done with this! Nope. This question has a second part, where you select evidence from the passage. Each answer choice refers to a sentence in the passage, and you pick the sentence that supports your answer to the previous question. It looks like this:

       Which choice provides the best evidence for the answer to the previous question?

      (A) Lines 32–34 (“The student … whole Dummies book.”)

      (B) Lines 43–45 (“On exam day … amazingly well.”)

      (C) Lines 68–74 (“Several schools … scholarships.”)

      (D) Lines 79–82 (“There was enough … a Jeep.”)

      Each passage has two best-evidence questions, for a total of ten in the Reading Test. Don’t worry. There’s a strategy for these.

      1 Using the answer choices, mark those sentences in the passage.This is an about-face from the previous strategy of covering the answer choices, but for the second part of the two-part question, it’s okay. Go through the passage and mark the four sentences that the answer choices refer to. This way, you can find them easily while you’re focusing on the actual question. You don’t have to distract yourself by looking for that dang sentence. Since each passage has two best-evidence questions, you don’t want to get the sentences you marked for the first one mixed with the sentences you marked for the second one. Mark the sentences one way for the first round, say with [brackets], and another way for the second round, such as underline.

      2 Reread the correct answer to the previous question.With 52 Reading questions, your thoughts start to get slippery. Make sure you’re clear on which bit of inference that you’re looking to support.

      3 Cross off the wrong sentences.See? This strategy is similar. With that previous answer in mind, go to the passage and cross off the sentences that don’t support it. Again, you’ll have three that are way off and one that is so-so, and that’s what you go with.

Here's an alternate approach: Some students like to work these two-part questions in tandem. They mark the sentences in the passage, then they use these sentence answers from the second question to find the answer to the first question. This is also an effective strategy, so try it out and see what you think.

Putting the Strategies to Use

      Strategies take practice. You’re not used to this approach, and it’s easy to mess it up the first few times. That’s okay. Practice the strategies, get them wrong, forget steps — before exam day. That’s what practice is for.

      Starting with the line-number questions

      Line-number questions aren’t always first, but they are the easiest to answer, making these the best and fastest segue to your understanding of the passage as a whole.

       This excerpt is from the science passage The Dancing Mouse: A Study in Animal Behavior, by Robert M. Yerkes.

      In Line 4, the best definition of “manifest” is

      Cover the answer choices! What do you think the best definition of “manifest” is as it’s used in the passage, based on what the “weakness” doesn’t do? How about “appear”? Now cross off wrong answers:

      (A) emphasize

      (B) prove

      (C) discover

      (D) show

      How did you do? Did you cross off Choices (A), (B), and (C)? They’re so far out that it has to be Choice (D). Here’s the logic:

(A)	emphasize	Cross this off: “Emphasize” refers to something already present, while “appear” refers to something new.
(B)	prove	Cross this off: “Prove” also refers to something already present, not something new like “appear.”
(C)	discover	Cross this off: “Discover” refers to actively finding something, while “appear” refers to being found.
(D)	show	Place a dot: “Show” could refer to actively finding something, but it also could refer to being found, like “appear.”

       Vocabulary-in-context questions like this one do have a trap. Many of these questions ask for the definition of a word you probably already know. But — the passage may use the word in an odd or unusual way, and the answer choices are usually known definitions of the word. For example, the word deck may be “a surface of a ship,” “a wooden structure outside a house,” “a pack of cards,” or “to decorate.” In the Christmas carol “Deck the Halls,” deck matches the last meaning, but outside the song, who uses that meaning? Don’t settle for a definition that you recognize: Make sure it matches the context of the sentence.

      Continuing with the detail questions

      Detail questions follow the line-number questions in that you can usually get them right without fully absorbing the entire passage. These are also keyword questions, where you skim the passage for keywords from the question. In this example, the passage is a single paragraph, so the keyword approach isn’t needed, but on the full-length passages, it makes a huge difference.

       According to the passage, in what way does the dancing mouse not have a weakness?