SAT Prep Black Book: The Most Effective SAT Strategies Ever Published (9 page)

This type of wrong answer uses a lot of the ideas mentioned in the citation, but messes up the relationships between them.
The College Board includes these types of wrong answers because they want to trap people who remember major concepts from the passage but who don’t bother to pay attention to the details—this is just one more example of the ways in which small details play a tremendously important role on the SAT.

Example:

his sister invested in a cure for his vision problems.

This
made-up example mentions the ideas of the sister, the investing, the vision problems, and the idea that the bifocals would correct those problems, but it messes up the relationships among those ideas. Students who don’t read carefully often fall for these types of wrong answers.

Sometimes the College Board will throw in a wrong answer that might be factually accurate, but that isn’t specifically reflected in the text. This type of wrong answer doesn’t appear too often, but if you do a few practice tests you’ll probably run into it at least once or twice.

Example:

he was tired of having to switch between different types of glasses.

Students who know why Franklin really invented bifocals, but who don’t know how the SAT actually works, might be tempted by
such a factually accurate statement.

This might be one of the most dangerous and insidious wrong answer types when it comes to trapping test-takers who know how the test works. For this type of wrong answer, the College Board provides a phrase that mirrors the text exactly—except for one or two words. Even when test-takers know they have to find answer choices that restate the passage, they can still fall for these kinds of wrong answers if they’re not in the habit of constantly attacking every single word they read.

Example:

his sister had a congenital vision problem.

In this wrong answer, the ideas of “sister” and “had a vision problem” directly restate the phrase “Franklin’s sister was visually impaired” from the fake citation. But the word “congenital” isn’t reflected at all in the citation, so this answer choice would be wrong if this were a real SAT question. Remember that you have to look for a textual justification for every concept in every answer choice.

The College Board frequently creates wrong answers that would be valid, defensible interpretations of the text in a literature class. Students often fall for these types of wrong answers if they’re still mistakenly approaching the test in a subjective, interpretive way, instead of in the
correct, objective way.

Example:

Franklin loved his sister and wanted to make her life easier.

In this imaginary example, the answer choice reflects the fact that the text mentions Franklin’s sister’s eye problems as a motivation for the invention. But the answer choice adds an interpretation when it speculates that Franklin was motivated by love and a desire to ease his sister’s suffering. While that would certainly be a plausible interpretation of the passage,
any
kind of interpretation—whether plausible or not—will be a wrong answer. Since the text didn’t mention Franklin loving his sister, we’re not allowed to assume that he did.

These wrong-answer types, or combinations of them, will account for most of the wrong answers you’ll encounter in SAT Passage-Based Reading questions. Basically, they all boil down to the idea that wrong answers provide information that differs from the information found in the relevant portion of the text, while the right answer for each question will restate concepts from the relevant portion of the text.

Now that we’ve explored the types of wrong answers we’re likely to encounter on Passage-Based Reading questions,
you’re probably eager to see how we actually go about answering questions. But before we get into that stuff, there’s just one more thing we have to talk about: how to read passages on the SAT.

One of the most common issues people have with the Passage-Based Reading questions is the issue of actually reading the passage. Another popular question is how to take notes on the passages.

So let’s talk about those things. My answers are pretty simple, really:

o
You can read the passage in any way you want, as long as it leaves you enough time to finish the section. You can even skip reading the passage if you want, and just refer back to portions of the text on a question-by-question basis.

o
You shouldn’t take any kind of notes whatsoever on the passage.

Like most good SAT advice, those two tactics contradict most of what you may have heard from teachers, tutors, and prep books. So let’s explore them a little. (If you haven’t already read my previous
remarks on what makes right answers right and wrong answers wrong on Passage-Based Reading questions, I would recommend you go back and do that before proceeding.)

When we talked about co
rrect answer choices for these questions, we indicated that they restate elements of the relevant portion of the original text. This is necessary because the College Board needs to have an objective, legitimate reason to say that one choice is correct and the others are incorrect, and the only real way to do that is to have the correct answer be the only choice that restates the passage.

This means
there are always specific words and phrases in the passage that correspond to the correct answer. It also means that, technically,
the only portion of the text you need to read for any question is the specific portion that contains the ideas restated in the correct answer
.

So, in theory, if it were somehow possible to know in advance which portions of the text were going to contain the key phrases restated in the correct answer, we could avoid reading the rest of the passage.

In other words, there is literally
no benefit whatsoever
in trying to get an overall impression of the passage, because there will never be a real SAT question in which the only way to find the correct answer is to make a general inference from the entire text. (To be sure, there are some students who try to draw inferences from the text and have some success, but it’s not the most efficient approach, and it’s never
necessary
. We can always find the answer for every question spelled out somewhere in the text.)

For this reason, it doesn’t really matter which specific method you use to read the text. All that matters is that you
can locate the relevant portion of the text so that you can figure out which answer choice restates it as quickly as possible without sacrificing accuracy.

In general, there are three ways to do this, and I recommend you play around with them to see what works best for you. Again, you can mix, match, or modify these approaches as you see fit, so long as you come up with a system that lets you find the relevant portion of the text quickly enough to allow you to complete the entire section within the time limit.

The first approach is the old standard of simply reading the passage before attempting the questions. This is by far the most widely used approach. It can definitely work, as long as you don’t read too slowly to finish the section before time is called. One note, though—if you read the passage first, don’t worry about trying to understand it as an organic whole.
Definitely
don’t take notes on it, for reasons we’ll get into in a moment. Just give it a thorough once-over. You’re going to have to come back to specific parts of it later to verify which answer choices are correct anyway, so just read it once and move on to the questions.

The second-
most popular approach is to skip reading the passage and just move straight to the questions. Then you start with the questions that have specific line citations. For each citation question, you go back to the relevant portion of the text, read that portion, and then consider the answer choices. When you’ve finished all the citation questions, you’ll generally have a good idea of how the passage is structured. Then you move on to the questions with no citations. Many of those questions will mention key concepts that you’ll recall from the citation questions, so you’ll know where to go back in the passage and locate those portions of the text again. When a question has no citation and also doesn’t refer to something that you’ve already read, you can simply skim the portions of the text that you haven’t read yet to find the relevant key terms, and proceed accordingly.

And that brings us to the third type of approach, which involves lightly skimming the passage before approaching the questions, in order to construct a rough mental map of where different terms and concepts appear in the passage.
I want to stress that, so I’ll say it again: in this type of skimming, you’re just moving your eyes through the text quickly, NOT trying to understand the text, but trying to get a rough idea of where various concepts appear in the text so you can use your ‘roadmap’ for later. This way, if a question lacks a citation, you can look at the concepts in the question and in the answer choices and recall those concepts from your skimming. This allows you to zero in on the relevant part of the text and then find your answers. Of course, you can always re-skim if you need to.

Again, it’s important to be aware of these different approaches, and to play around with them during your practice sessions so you can figure out what works best for you.
Different students will prefer different approaches based on their personalities and skills.

You may be wondering why I’m opposed to the idea of taking notes on the text. The reason is simple, actually: taking notes involves interpreting the text, and interpreting the text isn’t helpful on the SAT. As we keep discussing, the correct answer to every single question is spelled out somewhere on the page
, so there’s no need for you to interpret what you’re reading.

But, above all, don’t lose sight of the fact that the answer to every real SAT Passage-Based Reading question will be spelled out somewhere on the page.

Most Passage-Based Reading questions can be answered with a fairly simple process, which we’ll discuss now. Later, I’ll show you how to answer other types of questions that might seem a bit odd. (Actually, the process we’ll use for
all
Passage-Based Reading questions is basically the same process with a few very minor, very occasional modifications, but I’ll present them as unique scenarios because most students have already been taught to see them that way by other tutors or books.)

Don’t worry if this process feels uncomfortable or strange when you first read it. In later sections, we’ll go through a lot of Blue Book questions together, and you can see the process in action for yourself. You could also watch the videos at
www.SATprepVideos.com
to get a feel for the process.

For the moment, we’re only going to talk about questions with line citations. Then we’ll cover the modifications for questions without them.

There are a lot of ways to approach reading the actual passage
, as we discussed in the earlier section. Pick whichever approach works for you, whether it’s one of the ones I explained above or your own approach.

If the citation is a line citation and the cited line picks up in the middle of a sentence, go back up to the beginning of that sentence and start there
. (It may also help to read the sentence before or after the sentences in the citation, but this often isn’t necessary.)

It’s generally easiest
to find wrong answers first. For one thing, there are four times as many of them; for another, it’s usually easier to identify ways that answer choices differ from the text than it is to feel confident that a choice says exactly the same thing as the text. Expect to find that most (and very possibly all) of the wrong answers you find will fit into one of the types I talked about earlier.

If you end up not being able to eliminate 4 choices, then you’re making some kind of mistake. It might be that you’ve misread the text or the question. It might be that your understanding of one of the words you read is slightly (or very) inaccurate. It’s often the case that people who are left with 2 or 3 answer choices that seem to restate the text probably aren’t being picky enough about sticking to
exactly
what each word means to ensure an accurate restatement.

If you end up eliminating all 5 answer choices from consideration, then, again, you’ve made some kind of mistake, but it
might be a different kind of mistake. You may have been referring to the wrong part of the passage, for instance. You might also have misread or misunderstood one or more words.

See if the remaining answer choice fits the right answer pattern (in other words, see if it restates
concepts and relationships from the relevant portion of the text). If it does, that’s great.

If you still can’t identify one choice that clearly restates the passage and four choices that don’t restate the passage, you’ll need to consider the pr
ospect of guessing. I would advise the vast majority of students NOT to guess on SAT Passage-Based Reading questions, for the reasons discussed in the article in this book called “A Word on Guessing: Don’t.”

And that’s it, believe it or not—the process for Passage-Based Reading questions typically isn’t as complex as the processes for other question types can be.

As I noted above, the simple process we just went through works on all line-citation questions
exactly as described. In a broader sense, it works on all Passage-Based Reading questions. But let’s look at some specific, small adjustments we might make if the question isn’t exactly a classic line-citation question.