by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 26, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
Many test-takers find Passage 1/Passage 2 comparison questions to be among the most difficult on the SAT. Keeping track of multiple arguments and points of view can be challenging, and for this reason it is very much to your advantage to break the process into manageable chunks.
The single most important thing you can with Passage 1/Passage 2 comparisons is to treat them like single passages for as long as possible. That means:
1) Read Passage 1
2) Write the tone and main point
3) Answer Passage 1 questions
Then, when you’re done:
1) Read Passage 2
2) Write the tone, main point, and the relationship to Passage 1
3) Answer Passage 2 questions
And finally, when you’re done with Passage 2, answer the questions that ask about both passages (if they appear before questions asking about only one of the passages, skip them and come back later). Make sure you reiterate the relationship between the two passages before you begin the comparison questions.
While long Passage 1/Passage will always have questions asking about the two passages individually, short Passage 1/Passage 2 may not.
The first thing you should do when you encounter short Passage 1/Passage 2 is therefore to skim through the questions and see whether there are any that deal with only one passage. If there are, read that passage first.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 25, 2011 | Blog, General Tips
When you take a standardized test, you are your own worst enemy. From what I have observed, many test-takers score lower than they should simply because they second-guess themselves and change right answers to wrong ones. Believing that the answer they chose was too obvious and thus a trap, they talk themselves out of a perfect logical selection and go for something less obvious — and wrong — instead. Almost never do I see students change incorrect answers to correct ones when they go back over a section, only the other way around. So I’m going to propose something a little radical: don’t check your work.
I know this probably flies in the face of what you’ve always been been told: make sure you leave some time at the end of every section to go back and check….right? But for many students, working this way can do more harm than good. Please do not misunderstand me: I am not at all suggesting that you just whip through the questions without thinking twice about them and then stride blithely off, confidently assuming you’ve gotten everything right. This only works if you are willing to work very, very carefully the first time through; to go just a little bit slower than you think is necessary (assuming that time isn’t a problem); and to break down the questions piece by piece and reason your way through them meticulously.
True story: One of my students never scored as well as he should have on ACT English because every time he checked his work, he changed wrong answers to right ones. So finally I just told him to stop checking his work.
When he came home from the ACT, his mother asked him if he’d checked his work on the English section. He said he had. “Don’t lie to me,” his mother responded. “Ok, fine, I didn’t,” he admitted, “but only because Erica told me not to.”
When his mother called and told me that, my first thought was, “Oh s–t, if he blows it, his mother is going to be furious.” I won’t deny that it crossed my mind that perhaps I should have made him check his work after all.
But then got his score back.
And the English was a 35.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 25, 2011 | Blog, General Tips
Very often, test-takers miss “NOT” and “EXCEPT” questions (e.g. “Which of the following is NOT mentioned in by the author as a technique used by Da Vinci when he painted the “Mona Lisa”?) simply because they don’t read them carefully enough. Instead of finding the information missing from the passage, they do exactly the opposite and thereby answer the question incorrectly. Even though these all-important words are capitalized, they’re astonishingly easy to overlook.
So always circle them, underline them, star them, or do something to draw attention to them so that you won’t forget what you’re looking for. It’s worth spending an extra second or two to make sure you don’t unnecessarily lose the points.
A couple of years ago, I had an ACT student — let’s call him J. — who literally got every single one of this type of question wrong on the first few practice tests he did. After I told J. perhaps 50 or 60 times that his score would probably shoot up a good 5 points if he just started circling those words, it finally occurred to him to listen to me. Sure enough, he scored above a 30 the first time he tried that strategy. He was incredulous. “Gee,” I said. “Who ever would have guessed that would happen?”
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 23, 2011 | Blog, Grammar (SAT & ACT)
Dangling modifiers are guaranteed to show up on both the SAT and ACT. You can reasonably expect to encounter one on every test. So what is a dangling modifier, and how do you fix it? Dangling modifiers are best explained through examples, so let’s take a look at an example.
Correct: The dog jumped over the fence after escaping from its leash.
In this sentence, the subject (the dog) appears immediately and the modification follows. We can, however, also rewrite the sentence so that the modification comes before the subject:
Correct: After escaping from its leash, the dog jumped over the fence.
Even though the dog no longer appears at the beginning of the sentence, it is still the subject. And at the beginning of the sentence, we now have a clause that describes the subject but that does not name it. If the subject does not immediately follow that description, however, the result is a dangling modifier. When taken literally, sentences that contain dangling modifiers are often completely absurd.
Dangling Modifier: After escaping from its leash, the fence was jumped over by the dog. (Implies that the fence escaped from its leash.)
Dangling Modifier: After escaping from its leash, jumping over the fence was what the dog did. (Implies that jumping escaped from its leash.)
While some of the dangling modifiers that appear on the SAT and ACT clearly sound wrong, like the sentences above, others can be much harder to catch — especially if you’re not looking out for them.
For example: (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 22, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
One of the things that continually amazes me is the following situation: a student is working carefully through a reading question and begins to cross off answers. First one, then another, then a third. And then…nothing. The student continues to stare at the two answer choices. “Is there anything in the passage that clearly points to one of the answers?” I ask. The student scrunches up his or her face in concentration, staring off into space, trying, trying to remember….
At which point I oh-so-politely suggest that perhaps the student might want to consult the passage…because, you know, there’s an off chance the answer might be in there. As opposed to somewhere on the wall across the room. To paraphrase Jane Austen, it is a standardized testing strategy universally acknowledged that if you are down to two answer choices, you should guess. (One answer is just as likely to be right as the other, right?)
Except that you really shouldn’t.
As a matter of fact, there are a couple of very specific things you should do instead. First, you should reiterate your main point (which, ideally, you should have written down as soon as you finished reading the passage), or at least the point of the lines in question. Is there an answer that rephrases it? If there is, chances are it’s right. If that doesn’t work, you should go back to the passage and read it very, very carefully, making sure to start a couple of lines above and read to a couple of lines below.
With the exception of questions that ask about the passage as whole, the information you need to answer the question will always be located in the immediate vicinity of the lines you’ve been given. It might not be in the lines themselves, but it’ll almost always be very close by.
In addition, when you do go back and read (instead of, say, waiting for the heavens to open and an angel to descend and inform you of the correct answer), you need to pay particular attention to any important transitions or explanations that appear in the text. Chances are they’ll give you the information you need. Usually when students go back to the passage, they’re astonished to discover that the answer was right there all along.
Amazing, isn’t it?
Bonus question (scroll down for the answer):
Throughout this article, my tone could best be characterized as
(A) perplexed
(B) hostile
(C) appreciative
(D) facetious
(E) ambivalent
Answer: (D)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 17, 2011 | ACT Reading, Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
If you have timing issues on reading, you may want to try the following:
1. Read the introduction slowly until you figure out the basic point of the passage. Underline it.
2. Read the first and last sentence of each of the body paragraphs; if you can skim through the rest, do; if you’re too afraid you’ll run out of time, don’t bother. The goal is to establish a mental outline of the argument being presented. 1 Paragraph = 1 Idea, and the first (topic) sentence will give you the point of the paragraph, which the remainder of the information in it will most likely support.
3. Read the conclusion slowly and underline the last sentence, which usually restates the main point.
As long as you can keep in mind the important shifts (for example, the places where an author switches from criticizing one idea to proposing her own explanation), you’ll have plenty of context when you go back and answer the questions. In fact, working this way can actually make it easier to answer them because you won’t be so caught up in the details.
