SAT Prep Black Book: The Most Effective SAT Strategies Ever Published (58 page)

For these questions, you’ll be given a short, poorly written composition, and asked questions about how the composition could be improved. In general, the questions will ask about changes that could be made to individual sentences, ways to combine two sentences into one, or additions or subtractions that could be made to individual paragraphs.

For the most part, the rules for Improving Paragraphs are essentially the same as the rules for Improving Sentences, because most of these questions are questions that could have appeared as Improving Sentences questions. The only questions you’ll have to deal with in this section that are really new are the ones about adding and deleting sentences, so the rule below bears mentioning:

According to the SAT Writing s
ection, the best paragraphs mention each concept in the paragraph more than once.

So whenever you’re asked if a sentence should be deleted
from a paragraph, choose to delete a sentence if the sentence introduces a topic that isn’t mentioned elsewhere in the paragraph. And whenever you’re asked if a sentence should be added, choose to add the sentence that will restate the most ideas in the original paragraph, or that introduces the fewest new concepts to the paragraph.

This is the recommended process for SAT Improving Paragraphs questions. Note that it incorporates the processes for the other SAT writing multiple
-choice questions, and has some similarity to the Passage-Based Reading process.

Remember that the Improving Paragraphs questions are sort of a combination of Improving Sentences questions and Passage-Based Reading questions. Many of the questions are almost exactly like Improving Sentences questions, and those can be answered using almost exactly the same approach as the normal Improving Sentences questions.

Use the Improving Sentences approach on the appropriate questions, but be careful—there are certain things you have to look out for. For example, there may not be an underlined portion of the sentence to fix; instead, any portion of the sentence might be changed, or the entire sentence could be replaced with a similar sentence that has the same effect. Still, the goal with these questions will be to find the optimal “SAT-ideal” sentence: the one that avoids the most “bad” patterns and uses the most “good” patterns. So you’re looking for things like correct grammar, fewer short words, and so on.

There’s another very important difference you need to be aware of! For Improving Paragraphs questions, the best way to deal with a sentence may be to delete the sentence entirely. If the question asks you to add or delete a sentence from a paragraph, remember that the “SAT-ideal” paragraph repeats each concept at least once. This means you should choose to delete (or not to add) sentences that discuss concept that aren’t anywhere else in the paragraph, while sentences that stick to the same concepts as the rest of the paragraph should be added or kept.

Questions that ask about an author’s goal or strategy, or questions that ask about the relationships between one part of a composition and another, can be handled in the same way that we attacked the Passage-Based Reading questions.
(As a quick refresher, remember that we NEVER succumb to subjectivity in answering these types of questions, no matter how the prompt for the question is written!)

Based on your assessment of the question, answer it by using the appropriate approach from the Improving Sentences of Passage-Based Reading processes.

You’ve probably noticed that the recommended process for answering these questions types is fairly short. That’s because these questions are often extremely similar to the Improving Sentences and Passage-Based Reading questions, so we were able to incorporate the process for those questions in Steps 2 and 3.

At any rate, let’s take a look at these processes in action against real SAT questions published by the College Board!

In this section, we’ll apply what we’ve learned to some real SAT questions from the College Board
’s Blue Book,
The
Official SAT Study Guide
. I strongly advise you to follow along with these explanations in your copy of the Blue Book to help you learn how to apply these concepts.

For this question, we need to think about the College Board’s idea of the ideal paragraph. (C) will be correct because the paragraph mentions palaces and explains what castles are, but doesn’t explain what palaces are. Adding information about what a palace is doesn’t introduce a new topic to the paragraph, so the College Board will prefer this answer.

(A) i
s wrong because medieval history isn’t already mentioned in the paragraph.

(B) i
s wrong because word origins are irrelevant to the passage.

(C) i
s correct.

(D) d
oesn’t work because sentence 7 isn’t talking about the same things as sentence 1.

(E) d
oesn’t work because sentence 3 is relevant to sentence 2, so the College Board won’t want us to delete it.

For this question we need an answer that includes elements of sentences 3 and 4. We can think of this question as something similar to a Passage-Based Reading question, where our job is to find the answer choice that restates elements of the text.

(A) d
oesn’t work because labor isn’t mentioned in either sentence.

(B) d
oesn’t work because drawbridges are only mentioned in sentence 3.

(C) w
orks because “obstacles” restates the idea of “stone walls, moats, iron gates, and drawbridges” in sentence 3, while archers shooting out the windows in sentence 4 correspond to the word “peril” in this answer choice.

(D) d
oesn’t work because neither kings nor property nor feudalism appears in sentences 3 and 4.

(E) d
oesn’t work because the word “still” would indicate a contrast to the idea of “marauding plunderers” and “hostile armies,” but sentence 4 goes right back to the idea of shooting at “intruders.” So neither sentence 3 nor sentence 4 mentions the idea of people coming without “hostile intentions.”

Students often struggle with this question. The correct answer to this question will be the one that produces a sentence in accordance with the College Board’s reading comprehension ideas and its grammar and style rules for Writing multiple-choice questions, which we discussed earlier in this section.

(A)
doesn’t work because the word “because” makes it seem as though the reason that castles had dark dungeons was that palaces had more comforts.

(B)
doesn’t work because of the phrase “compared to,” which makes it seem as though the comforts are being compared to the palaces.

(C)
doesn’t work because it’s technically comparing two things of different types, which the College Board doesn’t like. At first, it seems to be comparing castles and palaces, which are both large medieval structures, and which should be fine for the SAT. But if we read carefully, we see that it’s technically comparing “medieval castles” to “many comforts,” since those two phrases are the beginnings of their parts of the sentence.

In other words, it might have been okay to say this:

While medieval castles offered only dungeons, royal palaces offered many comforts.

But it’s not okay to say this on the SAT:

*While medieval castles offered only dungeons, many comforts were in palaces.

In the first version, “medieval castles” are compared to “royal palaces,” but the structure of the second version makes us compare “medieval castles” to “comforts.”

This is one more example of the supreme importance of reading everything on the SAT very carefully and keeping the rules of the test in mind.

(D)
doesn’t work because the original text says that castles had dungeons and drafty living quarters “instead of” comforts. But this choice would be saying that castles didn’t offer comforts outside of dungeons and drafty quarters. In other words, this choice is saying that there are some comforts to be found in dungeons and drafty quarters, instead of saying that those things exist instead of comforts.

(E)
is correct because it says that castles offered few comforts, and that castles had dungeons and drafty quarters, and that some comforts could be found in royal palaces.

Again, t
his is a very good example of the way we sometimes need to read very carefully to be able to separate a wrong answer from a correct answer.

For this question, we need a word that demonstrates the relationship among the ideas in sentence 9.  Since sentence 9 talks about keeping people away and about attracting visitors, we want a word like “ironically,” so (C) is correct. (Remember that the College Board uses the word “ironic” to describe a situation in which two ideas contradict one another—in this case, the idea of keeping people away contradicts the idea of attracting people.) (D) doesn’t work because it would establish a contrast between sentence 8 and sentence 9, not a contrast between the ideas in sentence 9 itself.

For this question, we need to insert an idea that restates concepts from the paragraph. (D) is correct because it restates ideas from sentence 12, since “crumbling away” goes with “decaying,” and “relative obscurity” goes with “ordinary street.” No other answer choice restates ideas from the paragraph. (A) comes close when it mentions the idea of being “obsolete,” but (A) says that there are some castles that aren’t obsolete, while sentence 8 says that “castles were made obsolete.” In other words, (A) contradicts the text.

Again, we want a sentence that restates a concept from sentence 12, almost as though this were a Passage-Based Reading question. Choice (B) is correct because the word “there” in the answer choice goes with “in one village,” “medieval austerity” in the answer choice goes with “castle,” and “modern comfort” in the answer choice goes with “cozy . . . houses.”

This was pretty small set of questions, but that’s because there are only 6 of these questions on each test anyway. We’ll move on to some of the harder ones from the Blue Book in the next section. And remember that you can see a free selection of video solutions to SAT questions at
www.SATprepVideos.com
.

We’ve just finished answering a whole test’s worth of Improving Paragraphs questions. Now let’s take a look through the
College Board’s Blue Book (the
Official SAT Study Guide
) and talk about some of the challenging Improving Paragraphs questions from the rest of the book.

We’ll find that all of the other Improving Paragraphs questions rely on the same basic concepts from the Improving Sentences questions and the Passage-Based Reading questions that we’ve already discussed elsewhere in this book; our job as test-takers is really just to look for opportunities to apply those principles on each new question.
Following along with these solutions in your copy of the Blue Book will help you continue to improve your performance on Improving Paragraphs questions.

As with
all the other question explanations in this book, you’ll need a copy of the second edition of the “Blue Book” to follow along. Let’s get started!

This question is basically an Improving Sentences question. That means we should choose the answer that combines correct grammar with the most ideal stylistic patterns (all according to the College Board, of course).

The original version of the sentence isn’t grammatically acceptable because it’s a comma splice
—in other words, it incorrectly uses a comma to join two sets of words that could each stand as complete sentences on their own. Choice (B) is grammatically okay. Choice (C) is grammatically unacceptable, since it would technically be making the “version” the thing that was doing the “expecting.” Choice (D) is almost grammatically acceptable, but putting the word “these” in a new sentence introduces some ambiguity: “these” might refer to the plural word “reviews” or to the plural word “purists.” (E) is grammatically acceptable because the comma after “purists” makes it clear that the phrase “those who expect” is referring to that word.

So that leaves us with (B) and (E) as grammatically acceptable options according to the SAT. Now we need to figure out which option has the best style according to the College Board. We can use the style patterns from the Improving Sentences questions for that. We see that (E) is shorter, has fewer words ending in “-ed,” and has fewer words that are less than 5 letters long.

So (E) will be the choice that the College Board says is correct.

This question is essentially a Passage-Based Reading question, so we’re just looking for the answer choice that describes the first paragraph of the essay.

(A) is the correct answer because the verb “elaborate” means to discuss something in detail, and the “view” being discussed in detail in the first paragraph is the view that these remakes are “disrespectful and a waste of time and money.” The rest of the essay then “contrasts” with that view.

(B) is wrong because no personal experience is included in the first paragraph—the author never says, “I went to see movie X and this is what I thought . . .”

(C) is wrong because the first
paragraph does
mention
what some modern critics have thought, but it doesn’t
analyze
what they’ve thought. For this answer to be correct, the text would need to discuss the motivations and repercussions of modern criticism, which it doesn’t do.

(D) is wrong because there is no introduction, and the passage isn’t about any kind of approach to writing fiction.

(E) is wrong because the text never mentions playfulness.

This question is essentially an Improving Sentences question. To answer it, we’ll find the version of the sentence with acceptable grammar and the most ideal stylistic choices.

The shortest answer choice for this question is (E), and it’s grammatically acceptable. So it’s going to be the right answer . . . as long as the word “it” at the beginning of the sentence is referring to a singular noun from the previous sentence. So we check the previous sentence, and confirm that the word “it” in sentence 2 is referring to the word “camp” from sentence 1.
So (E) checks out as the correct answer.

This question probably looks pretty bizarre, but it’s actually asking us to use the same kinds of paraphrasing skills we would use in a Passage-Based Reading question. The correct answer here is (D), because this sentence restates the ideas in sentence 5: “live together” in sentence 8 is the same thing as “eat and play together, share bunkhouses.”

These types of questions are often confusing for untrained test-takers, but we should know by now that we’re going to answer this by applying the rules and patterns from the Improving Sentences questions, particularly the patterns about making sentences as short as possible, avoiding words ending in “-ing” and “-ed,” and avoiding short words.

Only (C) would bring the sentence more in line with those patterns, by swapping an “-ing” word (“being”) and a short word (“that”) for the word “since.” (A) and (B) would only make the sentence longer, (D) would have no real effect, and (E) would create a grammatical mistake.

This question is just one more great example of how important it is to be aware of the subtle patterns on the SAT!

At first, this question looks like it’s basically an Improving Sentences question. If we look carefully, though, we’ll see that many of the answer choices seem grammatically and stylistically okay from the College Board’s standpoint, but no two answer choices express exactly the same idea. That means we also need to bring in some Reading Comprehension skills to see which answer choice is restating the concepts in the original sentence.

One thing that’s very important to realize here is that the second sentence is saying that the
worker
needs to “assume responsibility.” We know this because the second sentence says “he or she” should assume it, and “he or she” can only refer to a singular noun. The only singular noun in the previous sentence is the word “worker,” so the worker needs to do the assuming.

(D) might seem like a good answer choice, but (D) actually says that the only workers who need to assume responsibility are the ones “whose employers are familiar.” The original text doesn’t say that, though—it says that any worker should assume responsibility.

(B) is the only answer choice that gets that relationship exactly right, because it says that all workers need to assume responsibility, just like the original version of sentence 3.

Remember that it’s absolutely critical to read things carefully and to think about the rules of the SAT! If you commit to doing that on each question, you’ll be nearly unstoppable.

This question is essentially an Improving Sentences question. The shortest answer choice is (D), but it has a grammatical mistake: it results in a sentence fragment. So now let’s think about other patterns.

(A) is a run-on sentence, so it can’t be right.

(B) is pretty awkward, but let’s try to quantify what’s actually wrong with it (just calling something “awkward” is too subjective to be a reliable approach). It has 9 short words (which are words less than 5 letters long, as I mentioned in our discussion of the patterns to look out for on Improving Sentences questions).

(C) has 7 short words, along with 1 “-ing” word.

(E) has 5 short words and 1 “-ing” word.

So the answer choice with the fewest offensive words (according to the College Board’s unwritten rules and patterns) is choice (E), which means (E) will be correct. It’s grammatically acceptable and does the best job of conforming to the College Board’s patterns of preferring the fewest short words and the fewest “-ed” or “-ing” words possible.

Just to be crystal clear, I’d like to reiterate that there’s nothing act
ually wrong with short words or
“-ing” words in real life. The reason we care about them on the SAT is that the College Board generally doesn’t like to see those kinds of words in correct answers on Improving Sentences questions. Once more we see the extreme importance of knowing the unique rules that the test follows.

This question is basically a Passage-Based Reading question, so we’ll answer it by reading carefully and avoiding any kind of subjective interpretation.

(A) works because the “possible response” might be that a person who reads sentence 1 wonders if “microphones” are involved, since sentence 1 mentions “listening in.”

(B) might seem tempting, but the second sentence doesn’t actually provide “historical background”
for sentence 1
. It does provide a historical fact, but it doesn’t provide background for sentence 1 because sentence 1 isn’t set in the historical time period mentioned in sentence 2. Sentence 2 is talking about how things were in the middle ages, but sentence 1 is talking about “this summer.”

(C) is wrong because no idea is repeated.

(D) is wrong because no contrasting view is mentioned. The first sentence says the author “felt as if” something was happened, while the second sentence says that thing could not literally have happened. But the first sentence doesn’t say that anything
did
happen—it just says the author
felt like
it happened. So there’s no actual contrast here.

(E) is wrong for the same reason (D) is. It would have been inaccurate to say that the writer really was listening in on the middle age, but that’s not what sentence 1 says—sentence  1 just says the writer “felt as if” that was happening, which isn’t necessarily an inaccurate statement.

This question is one more example of the importance of reading every word carefully. (Now that this book is almost over, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve come back to the idea of reading everything carefully roughly a million times. There’s a reason for that. Reading
everything
carefully is the single most important thing we can do as SAT-takers.)

This is basically a Passage-Based Reading question, so we’ll answer it by looking carefully at the text.

(A) appears in the passage in places like sentence 6, when the author gives “background information” on the practical realities of traveling in the middle ages.

(B) would be kind of troubling to me: there’s definitely description, but how can we know for sure if the College Board thinks the description is “imaginative?” I would put this answer aside and keep looking to see what the other choices are. If one of the other choices clearly isn’t in the passage, then we’ll know that must be right, and we’ll know that the College Board apparently considers this kind of description to be “imaginative.”

(C) is clearly not anywhere in the passage—not only are there no “rhetorical questions,” but there aren’t any questions at all, of any kind.
There are no question marks. So we now know that (C) is the thing missing from the text, and (B) must be present in the text. This means (C) is correct, since the question asked us to find the one choice that wasn’t present in the passage.

(D) is in the text because the entire passage is narrated in the first person.

(E) is in the text because sentences 10 and 11 contain quotations.

This question is essentially a Passage-Based Reading question.

(A) doesn’t work because the topics in sentence 5 have already appeared in the essay.

(B) doesn’t work for basically the same reason that (A) doesn’t work. Even if Nancy Price is an example of something, she’s already been mentioned, so sentence 5 doesn’t provide an additional example of anything.

(C) works, and for a pretty subtle reason: the word “right” in the sentence emphasizes the word “there.” I’ll have more to say on this after we go through the other answer choices.

(D) doesn’t work because there are no contrasting discussions in the essay.

(E) doesn’t work because this is a statement of fact, not an opinion of the author.

This is a question that many test-takers will be inclined to guess on, or to skip, because none of the answer choices is likely to seem too appealing. We can only realize that (C) is correct if we notice that the phrase “right there” is a way to emphasize a particular location—in this context, the only way that the word “right” can make any sense is as a word emphasizing the word “there.”

This is a pretty subtle thing to notice, but it’s also as clear as day once we do notice it. And the ability to pay close attention and notice these kinds of things is exactly the kind of skill we need to have if we’re going to get an elite score on the SAT.

This question is one that most untrained test-takers will struggle with, because
they don’t know the College Board’s style patterns (which we talked about in the section on Improving Sentences questions).

But since we know those patterns, all we have to do is look for the answer choice that would violate those patterns the most (because the question asks us to find the worst answer choice in terms of those patterns, not the best one).