by Erica L. Meltzer | May 8, 2011 | SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
Paired passage questions have a reputation for being some of the most headache-inducing questions on the SAT. While I agree that they’re not exactly fun, the relationships between the two passages do tend to fall into a small number of predictable categories used over and over again. If you approach the two passages with these “templates” in mind, you can probably save yourself some frustration.
1) Passage 1 and Passage 2 present opposing views of the same topic (P1 = Positive, P2 = Negative or vice-versa). This is the most common relationship.
2) Passage 1 and Passage 2 agree but have different focuses or stylistic differences (e.g. P1 is written in the third person and P2 is written in the first person)
3) Passage 1 and Passage 2 discuss completely different aspects of the same event (e.g. P1 focuses on how an event was perceived by the press, P2 focuses on how it affected women)
4) Passage 2 provides an example of a phenomenon discussed in Passage 1
by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 27, 2011 | Blog, Reading (SAT & ACT), SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
One of the hardest things for many test-takers to adjust to on the SAT and ACT is the idea that English questions have answers that are both objectively correct and objectively incorrect. The truth, however, is that if you really want to improve your score, you need to approach each question with the attitude that there is only one answer. It might not be phrased in the way you would say it, or even be the answer that you would expect to see, but that doesn’t make it any less right.
Your English teacher might give you points for the creativity of your interpretations; ETS and the ACT will not. These tests are in no way, shape or form asking for your own personal interpretation or for speculation about what might be going on in a given passage; they are asking for what an author indicates is definitely going on in the passage. That means you need to base your answer exclusively on the exact wording that appears in the text and nothing else. If you have to twist the passage in any way to make the answer work, the answer is wrong.
In other words, match the question to the passage, not the passage to the question.
Let’s look at an example:
Newspaper editor and political commentator Henry Louis Mencken was a force of nature, brushing aside all objects animal and mineral in his headlong rush to the publicity that surely awaited him. He seized each day, shook it to within an inch of its life, and then gaily went on to the next. No matter where his writing appeared, it was quoted widely, his pungently outspoken opinions debated hotly. Nobody else could make so many people so angry, or make so many others laugh so hard.
9. In lines 4-5, the words “seized” and “shook” help establish which aspect of Mencken’s personality?
(A) His code of honor
(B) His sense of humor
(C) His vindictiveness
(D) His intensity
(E) His petulance
What words does the author use to describe Louis Mencken?
He was “a force of nature.” He “brushed aside objects…in his headlong rush.” He “seized each day and shook it…then went gaily onto the next.”
So Louis Mencken was like a whirlwind. He threw himself into things and did them as fully as possible. All this clearly points to (D) because someone who behaves like this is pretty intense.
If you were to read the question first and then just glance through the passage, however, you might just pick up on words/phrases like “brushed aside,” “seized,” and “hotly debated,” all of which are pretty negative, you might go for (C) or (E) instead. Now, Louis Mencken could have also been vindictive in his life. He could have also been petulant (irritable or ill-tempered).
But if you read carefully, this particular author is not actually saying either of those things about Mencken in this particular passage.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 23, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
One of the things I’ve noticed is that people hate to skip questions on the SAT. Even though they know that getting a question wrong will set them back an additional quarter of a point, they’d rather guess and risk lowering their score further than play it safe and move on. Skipping a question on the SAT is like admitting defeat: it means that you’re effectively giving up on the possibility of getting a perfect score, even if you’ve been consistently scoring in the mid 600s.
But guess what: while it does pretty much work that way for Math and Writing, on which even four missed questions can pretty much kill your chances of scoring in the 700s, Critical Reading has a much more generous curve. It is not necessary to answer every single question in order to obtain a high score. In fact, on some tests it’s actually possible to miss up to three questions and still get an 800. In contrast, four missed Writing questions along with an 8 essay will give you a score of about 670.
If you are actually trying to get an 800, I wouldn’t suggest that you skip Critical Reading questions (and if you are a serious contender for an 800, you really shouldn’t need to skip questions). But even if you’re just trying to break 700, you need to be open to the possibility of skipping a question or two if you really just have no idea about the answer.
To give you some cold, hard facts: In order to obtain a 700, it is usually necessary to obtain a raw score of about 57/67. Assuming that you skip 10 (!) questions and get all of the rest correct, that’s a 700 right there. Although I understand that skipping so many questions sounds far too risky to entertain, consider that choosing to skip 5 questions and then going for — and missing — another 5 that you’re not sure about will actually give you a score of 690. That’s a very important 10 points right there.
If you’re just trying to break 600, you have even more latitude. To hit 600, you only need a raw score of 45, or 2/3 of the questions right. Theoretically, if you skipped 22 questions and only answered the ones you were absolutely certain about, you could still pull a 600 (although I wouldn’t really advocate that you skip 22 questions).
A more likely scenario is that you skip 10 questions (which gets you to a raw score of 57), then miss another 8 for a raw score of 47 (8 x .25 = 2, and 49-2 = 47), for a scaled score of 610. If, on the other hand, you had tried to answer all 10 of the questions that you had skipped and gotten all of them wrong (statistically unlikely but possible if you really have no idea about them), that would give you a raw score of 42 and scaled 580.
So the bottom line is that sometimes you have be willing to give up the possibility of perfection in order to achieve something that’s merely very good. If you know that you always miss the last couple of vocab questions, plan to skip them; or, if you know that inference questions always trip you up, forget about them. It might just be enough to push your score to the next level.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 15, 2011 | SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
Perhaps some of you have heard of Adam Mansbach’s surprise best-seller Go the F**k to Sleep. The parent of a toddler, Mansbach wrote the book, which promptly rose to the top of the New York Times best-seller list, to convey the sheer hell of living with a three year-old who simply will not go to sleep.
While I don’t deal much with toddlers, there is one frustration I confront regularly that makes me believe I understand Mansbach’s exact sentiment — that is, a student’s total and utter unwillingness to go back to a Critical Reading passage and read. And at those moments, after I’ve said five or six times, “what does the author say?” only to be met with repeated blank stares, or “well, I feel like he’s saying…”, I do in fact want to say: “Go back to the f**ing passage and tell me, as literally as you possibly can, what it actually says. Not what you think you remember it says. Not what you feel it might be saying. Not what it makes you think of. What is actually says.”
I have lost track of the number of times a student, upon discovering that the answer is, say, (E) rather than (B), proclaims that he or she doesn’t really feel that the scenario described in (E) occurs in the passage. At which point I promptly go back to the passage and read an entire paragraph’s worth of exactly what was described in (E). It’s usually so obvious that the student can’t even argue.
So newsflash: going back and reading very carefully is the only way to be 100% certain that your answer checks out. If you are not willing to do this, the bottom line is that your score will most likely not improve dramatically regardless of how many practice tests you take.
Again, let me reiterate: if you refuse to go back and read, you have virtually zero chance of getting a score above 750 and a very minimal chance of getting one above 700.
Maybe you’ve heard about the 700 wall? This is often what it comes down to. I’ve had many students who came to me scoring in the 600s. Those who were willing to accept that they needed to go back and check everything out — and who saw that they actually got the answer that way, rather than just playing Russian roulette with process of elimination — ended up with scores in the 700s, in some cases very high in the 700s.
The ones who kept on insisting they didn’t need to check, who consistently refused to try to see the relationship between the correct answer and the specific wording in the text, and who remained perennially stuck on what they thought rather than trying to figure out what the author was saying, simply could not break 700 no matter how hard they tried. It was always hit or miss, not steady improvement. Yes, they got most of the answers right, but they also always got just enough answers wrong so that it really hurt their score. And some of them took literally dozens more practice tests than my higher-scoring students did — even if both had started out in approximately the same place.
Now, if you’re already consistently going back to the passage and having trouble understanding what it’s actually saying or are not certain how to locate the information necessary to answer the questions (not necessarily in the line numbers given), that’s a different story. You need to either work on building your literal comprehension (learning vocabulary and/or familiarizing yourself with “serious” college/adult-level writing) or on learning the types of words and phrases that you need to look out for.
But if neither of things is an issue for you, just go back and read the f**g passage.
Trust me. It works.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Mar 30, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
Very often, test-takers get stumped on “tone” or “attitude” questions because they look at each answer choice individually and ponder whether it could fit the passage. In other words, they try to fit the answer to the reading — always a bad idea.
Very often, test-takers get stumped on “tone” or “attitude” questions because they look at each answer choice individually and ponder whether it could fit the passage. In other words, they try to fit the answer to the reading — always a bad idea.
The process for breaking down tone questions is actually pretty simple: the first thing you always want to determine is whether the author’s attitude is positive or negative.
Say, for example, you’re dealing with a passage about the California gold rush, and you see the following question:
In lines 47-51, the author’s attitude toward the process of “staking claims” could best be characterized as:
(A) skeptical
(B) vitriolic
(C) approving
(D) elated
(E) ambivalent
The first thing you need to do is to figure out whether the author considers “staking claims” a good thing or a bad thing.
If it’s a good thing, you can automatically eliminate anything that is either negative or neutral, in this case A, B, and E. If it’s a bad thing, you can get rid of C and D.
Notice that we don’t care about the actual words at this point, only whether they’re good or bad.
Let’s say that the author considers “staking claims” a good thing, so we’re left with C and D.
In general, extreme answers tend to be wrong (if the tone of the passage were too obvious, you wouldn’t have to read closely, and the test would be too easy!), so right away, you know that there’s about a 90% chance the answer is C.
But unless you’re absolutely certain, go back to the passage and check!
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.
