SAT Prep Black Book: The Most Effective SAT Strategies Ever Published (14 page)

(E) is right because of statements like “all these theories are rather unconvincing” in line 36.

Students often miss this question because of not reading the text and the answer choices carefully enough. Most people who miss
the question either choose (A) or (B).

(A) is wrong for a couple of reasons, but the largest is probably the phrase “literary persona.” The article talks about Wilson “speaking directly through his letters,” but a “literary persona” would be a false personality deliberately adopted when writing a work of literature.

(B) doesn’t work because the text doesn’t actually mention whether Wilson was mature. It says he was direct, and that he wrote the same way at every stage of his life, but it doesn’t actually say that when he was young he wrote with the maturity of an older man. For all we know from the text, it might be that even as an old man he wrote with the immaturity of a young man.

(E) ends up being correct because the passage says that the same kind of writing (speaking “directly” and “informal(ly) for the most part,” et cetera) appears in letters Wilson wrote when he was “young, middle-aged, and old,” which means his style was consistent.

This is another question that often tricks students who don’t read carefully enough. Most people who miss the question choose (D), but (D) talks about “the discovery of the Andromeda galaxy,” which isn’t mentioned in the text at all. The idea of “Andromeda” is mentioned, but its discovery is not.

(B) ends up being correct because the text describes a now-extinct primate being alive, which is a “differen[ce].” (The footnote tells us that
Australopithecus
is extinct.) The word “dramatize” in this context basically means “illustrate” or “demonstrate.” “Two million years ago” is exactly from the text.

This question stumps a lot of people. The important thing with these “attitude” questions is to remember that the answer must be spelled out in specific phrases within the text, so we have to look for those. We don’t answer a question like this (or any other question) by just going with a rough idea of our impression of the text; we answer questions by finding choices that specifically restate the text.

Here, (E) is correct. Line 32 says that most people are “out of their depth” when considering real art; to be “out of your depth” means to be too unintelligent or inexperienced to deal with a new situation, so this is a “condescending” remark. Lines 4 and 5 say that “people in general” are not members of a “special class,” but that the special class isn’t necessarily “better;” this is a “tolerant” remark.

Let’s take a look at what makes the wrong answers wrong:

(A) doesn’t work because of “puzzled.” The author never says that the majority of people puzzle him, or that he can’t understand anything about them.

(B) doesn’t work because the author never specifically says anything hostile about the majority of people, either. He never says that he wishes anything painful or devastating would happen to them, even though it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t have much respect for their intellectual abilities.

(C) doesn’t work because the author never says anything to indicate that he respects the majority of people.

(D) doesn’t work because the author never says that he doesn’t care about the majority of people, which is what “indifferent” would require if it were going to be the correct answer to this question.

This question often seems challenging at first, but if we remember to follow the text carefully we can get through it. Most students, instead, try to answer it by interpreting the passage from a literary standpoint, which can only bring trouble.

The sentences about Clayton’s complexion appear at the end of a paragraph about Clayton’s behavior and appearance. That paragraph indicates that his sense of humor was a “
counterpoint to his own beliefs,” indicating that at least one aspect of his personality seems to contradict another aspect of it. This is why (A), which mentions his “complicated nature,” is the correct answer.

The other choices can’t be right, since the text doesn’t mention him being erratic, complacent, loyal, or argumentative in the text surrounding the citation.

This question often causes students to give up on the idea of finding an answer spelled out on the page, so it’s a very good example of how we must
always
insist on an objective answer, even when there doesn’t seem to be one at first.

People often fail to read this question carefully enough, and get it wrong as a result.

Many people incorrectly choose (B), because the first passage mentions an “exclusive” “concern” with “classification,” while the second passage mentions the ways certain scientific “possibilities” are “limit[ed]” (lines 18 and 19). But the problem with (B) is that the answer choice talks about the limits on “present-day science,” while passage 1 talks about an exclusive concern that lasted “for the next hundred years” after Linnaeus’s work, which happened in the 18th century according to line 1. So the first passage is talking about a limit that existed for 100 years after the 18th century, which means it wouldn’t apply to “present-day science,” since the present day is much more than 100 years after the 18
th century.

(A) ends up being correct because the first author refers to Linnaeus’s “enormous and essential contribution to natural history,” while the second author mentions “the value of the tool [Linnaeus] gave natural science.” (For this answer choice, it helps to realize that the terms “natural history” and “natural science” both refer to an area of study that is probably best known these days
as “biology.” In other words, “natural science” and “natural history” are synonyms, even if the words “science” and “history” aren’t synonyms by themselves.)

Once again, the test gives us an excellent reminder of the importance of reading everything very carefully.

Here, as always, it will be very important to read the question, the answer choices, and the relevant text extremely carefully to make sure we don’t fall for any traps.

The correct answer is (C) because the text describes how an actor would seem to die in one movie and then reappear alive, and transformed into someone new, in a later movie (lines 11 through 14). It then talks about movies being “illusions” in line 18 and their characters as “imaginary” in line 24, so (C) is correct.

Many people choose
(E), which seems like a very similar choice, but we have to be careful to note the differences between (E) and (C). (E) says that the actual
plots
of the movies were implausible, but this doesn’t reflect the original text if we read carefully. The original text describes somebody dying
in one movie
and then appearing alive and in a different costume
in another movie.
So we’re not talking about a plot in which someone dies and is resurrected and transformed, which might be “implausible;” we’re talking about one movie in which someone dies (which is plausible) and another movie where another character played by the same actor is an “Arab sheik” (which, again, is plausible). So the idea of a story with an implausible plot being told doesn’t fit the text; the text says that people were upset to realize that the actual things on the screen couldn’t be real, since people who died in one movie were alive in a later movie. It doesn’t say that the individual plot of a particular movie itself was implausible.

By the way, while we’re on the subject of this question, let’s talk about the very fine difference between an “imaginary” “illusion” and something that is “implausible.” If something is “implausible,” it is difficult to imagine or believe. On the other hand, if something is “imaginary,” then it’s not real. It’s possible that something could be imaginary while still being quite plausible: a short story about a child who draws on the sidewalk with chalk could be a work of fiction (and therefore imaginary) while still being very believable (and
therefore plausible).

In most classroom situations, if you referred to an illusion as something “implausible,” your teacher would probably have no problem with that; on the SAT, though, these kinds of subtle distinctions matter. The text describes things that didn’t happen; it doesn’t specifically describe the plot of any movie as “implausible.”

This question often looks challenging to test-takers, but, if we stay calm and consider each choice carefully, remembering that we want to find an answer choice that’s directly reflected in the text, we can work through it fairly easily.

(A) is wrong because the text doesn’t specifically say anything about the particular spots where things are found, and it doesn’t say anything about “social significance,” even though it mentions “social structures” in line 9.

(B) works because the text specifically says “much less is known” about a civilization “because linguists have yet to decipher the . . . script found on recovered objects.” In other words, it specifically says that the reason we don’t know as much about the Indus civilization is that we don’t understand its language, which means that understanding its language would help us know much more than we know right now. Note the similarities between “decipher” and “
decode.” So (B) is correct.

(C) doesn’t work because the text doesn’t specifically mention any such similarities. It does talk about social structures, and it does talk about old cultures, but it doesn’t specifically say that structures of old cultures were all similar to one another.

(D) doesn’t work for a variety of reasons. For one thing, there is a difference between “learn[ing] the language” and “decipher[ing] the script” of a language—we could learn to decipher written texts without actually knowing how to speak the language of that text. Another problem is the word “effective”—nothing in the text gives any specific indication of what would constitute “effective” archaeology.

(E) doesn’t work because the text only mentions “Harappan script.” It doesn’t make any generalizations about other “ancient languages.”

This is one of those questions in which the College Board gives credit for an answer choice involving the idea of humor, but most test-takers don’t find anything humorous in the text.

(B) is correct because the phrase “wickedness incarnate” can’t be meant literally—remember that the College Board will be okay with us calling things humorous (or, in this, calling something a “parody”) when the text describes something that can’t be taken literally. “Incarnate” literally means “made into flesh” (note the similarities of the roots in “incarnate” and “carnivore.”) So the text would be saying that people on the Right think that “government regulations” are always “wickedness incarnate.” (You may want to read lines 82 - 84 carefully to see what I’m talking about. The text says that some people are afraid of good news because it would mean that regulations can sometimes be “something other than wickedness incarnate.” This means that their assumption is that all regulations are normally “wickedness incarnate.”) The idea of “people with certain political leanings” from the answer choice matches with the phrase “the Right” in line 82: people on “the Right” tend to be conservatives.

(C) also talks about “humor,” but the phrase “deep longing of the author” has no parallel in the text.

This is a question in which we’re asked to find an answer choice with a scenario that parallels a scenario in the text. Strictly speaking, these kinds of questions can involve finding answer choices with concepts that aren’t direc
tly stated in the text, but the relationships among the concepts will still be exactly the same as what appears in the text.

In this question, we need to start by figuring out what “the problem presented in the passage” actually is. We see that it’s “the difficulty . . . in narrating personal experience in one language when one has lived in another.” This must be the “problem . . . in the passage,” because “difficulty” in line 6 is the only word that matches up with “problem” from the question.

So we’re looking for an example of somebody narrating in one language after living in another language.

(A) doesn’t work because it doesn’t even mention narrating things.

(B) doesn’t work because it’s talking about an assumption—like (A), it doesn’t even mention narrating personal events.

(C) doesn’t work for a few reasons; perhaps the easiest to spot is that it’s not talking about multiple languages.

(D) is correct because it talks about somebody trying to “articulate” things in “English,” even though he is “Russian.” So we have the idea of multiple languages, and we have the idea of articulation to match the text’s reference to narration.

(E) doesn’
t work because the answer choice doesn’t indicate which languages the journalist might be working in; it also doesn’t say which language(s) she would be writing in. Even if we assume she would write in Japanese for the Japanese audience and in English for the American audience, as many students do assume, that wouldn’t parallel the text, because the text is talking about living in one language and then writing in another.