BLACK BOOK-SAT READING SECTION

it combines basic ideas in weird but repetitive and predictable ways.

ONE CORRECT ANSWER, and it is definitively and incontrovertibly the correct answer. It is absolutely beyond disagreement, and there are no arguments to be made against it.

You must immediately recognize that you've done something wrong and either go on to the next question and come back to it once your head is cleared or keep working on it and try to figure out what might be causing the confusion while the question is still fresh in your mind.

Think carefully about parts of each question that most people might consider irrelevant.

I want to mark down correct answers for all the questions I feel I can work through pretty quickly and easily.

I want to get an idea of what the harder questions look like.

Put your eyes on every single question on the section, even if it was a glance to decide quickly that it was something that probably required more time.

give yourself 10 seconds to see if you can figure out how to arrive at an answer in 30 seconds or less.

Keeping in mind what you saw during your first pass, you go back to the beginning of the section and find the first question that you skipped during your first pass. you read it a bit more carefully and think about it a bit more deliberately than you might have done on your first pass: when you were just trying to answer the questions that seemed obvious to you.

You're willing to invest a few extra seconds trying to figure out how to approach a question than you were before.

When you've reached the end of your second pass, the only questions left unanswered are the ones that seem the most challenging.

On the third pass through the test, we need to keep in mind that our goal is basically to identify the unanswered question that we're most likely to be able to answer correctly with a little extra attention and reflection in the time we have left.

By the time you start this third pass, you're likely to have used up half of your allotted time on the section, or maybe even three quarters of it, or more. You may only have enough time to expect to answer 5 or fewer additional questions, so it's especially important to tackle the remaining questions in the order that you want.

Start your review and pass through the section when you've answered all the questions on the section that you think you can answer with certainty, or when there are about 10 minutes left, whichever comes first.

The goal is to go back through all the questions you've answered and make sure that you haven't made any mistakes in the answers you've marked. Be especially careful to check for all the little kinds of mistakes that the College Board likes to trick us into-stuff like looking at the wrong part of the reading passage, overlooking the subject of a verb on the writing and language section, solving for the wrong variable on a math question, and so on.

If you find yourself still working on a section with only a few minutes left before time expires, then you'll want to make sure that you mark down an answer for every question on the section, even if you have to guess blindly on some of them, because you'll at least be giving yourself the chance to get lucky on the questions you guess at.

The Vertical Scan is a technique/tactic that can help you notice the similarities, differences, and other relationships within a set of answer choices more easily, and keep them clear in your head with less effort.

Performing the Vertical Scan is relatively easy: we just mentally divide a set of answers choices into a few "columns" based on the similarities and differences that leap out at us, and then proceed to read down each column.

We can use the vertical scan whenever we notice that the answer choices in a question are highly similar to each other, or whenever we want to reconsider the relationships among the answer choices in light of the answer-choice patterns we've been trained to notice on a particular type of question.

They either

Restate the text without changing the meaning

Or

Demonstrate an idea that appear on the page

The correct answers to SAT Reading questions are always restated or demonstrated by relevant ideas from the text.

the incorrect answers are always wrong because they fail to be restated or demonstrated by the text, and/or because they add ideas that aren't in the text.

Restatement refers to the idea that two separate pieces of text express the same idea using different words.

When a correct answer depends on demonstration, one of 2 things happens:

The correct answer provides an example or scenario that's exactly described in the text or

The text provides an example or scenario that's exactly described in the correct answer

"Which is the only choice that means the same thing as"

"The author of passage 2 directly states which opinion"

"Which is the only choice that provides evidence for"

Wrong Answer Type 1: Off by one word

Wrong Answer Type 2: Barely Relevant

Wrong Answer Type 3: Statements that would be valid literary interpretation in a classroom

Wrong Answer Type 4: Reasonable statements that aren't in the text

Wrong Answer Type 5: Direct Contradiction

Wrong Answer Type 6: Confused Relationships

Wrong Answer Type 7: Restatement or Demonstration of The Wrong Part of The Passage

For this type of answer choice, the College Board provides a phrase that mirrors the text exactly—except for one or two words.

This type of answer choice is a statement that has almost nothing to do with the cited text.

The College Board frequently creates wrong answers that would be valid, defensible interpretations of the text in a literature class.

Example: For the prompt " Researchers have shown that Benjamin Franklin's sister was visually impaired, which might explain the amount of energy that Franklin invested in the invention of bifocals."

Wrong answer: "Franklin loved his sister and wanted to make her life easier"

Another very common type of wrong answer is one that might seem like a reasonable statement to a reader who already has a general familiarity(background knowledge) with the subject, even though the statement itself isn't restated or demonstrated in the passage.

This type of wrong answer uses a lot of the ideas mentioned in the citation(quote), but messes up the relationships(people) among them.

Some SAT Reading questions will cite a specific line or quotation from the text. The College Board knows that many untrained test-takers won't bother to go back to the original text to verify an answer choice before they pick it, which makes it easy to trick them by presenting an answer choice that's accurately restated or demonstrated by a part of the passage that's not cited in the prompt.

Introductions to each passage often contain critical information that identifies the author of the passage and the purpose for which the passage was written. Some prompts and answer choices will assume you already know this basic background information about the passage and there won't be any way to determine that information without investing a few seconds in reading that introduction.

1. Always Read the Brief Introduction to Each passage

2. Read or Skim the Passage if You Want To

3. Read the Question, Noting the Citation(idea from the author), If There is one. Then Read the Relevant text.

4. Find Three Wrong Answers

5. Look at the Remaining Answer Choice

When a question has no citation, very little actually changes in our approach to it. The answer to the question is still going to be spelled out somewhere in the passage, but now we have to figure out where, rather than having the convenience of being told which lines to look at.

Even though there's no specific citation, the answer is still going to be restated or demonstrated somewhere on the page. You should NOT try to answer a question with no citation by making a broad inference from the overall passage that isn't directly supported by actual phrases from the text.

Do all the questions with citations first, then come back to the ones without citations.

Thing we need to keep in mind for these types of questions:

1. The correct answer will be the part of the text that's directly restated or demonstrated in the question we're being asked about—without literary interpretation, judgment calls, or outside knowledge from the test-taker.

2. The cited text in the correct answer is sometimes sort of a summary of evidence discussed in the paragraph where that citation appears. In other words, you may find that the text immediately before or after the citation repeats or elaborates on the evidence in the citation itself. So don't be put off if some statement of relevant evidence appears just before or after the cited text from the right answer to the "best evidence" question—even though the cited text in the correct answer will provide evidence for the statement in question, there may be some additional relevant evidence that shows up just outside of that cited text.

3. Finally, the correct answer to this type of question is typically pretty straightforward—often, only one of the four choices will seem to have any real connection to the statement in the question. But, on the few questions when more than one choice seems plausible at first, we'll always find that only one choice refers to a part of the text that's specifically restated or demonstrated in the correct answer to the relevant question.

When we deal with these kinds of questions, we need to understand that the College Board isn't just asking us to pick an answer choice with a similar meaning to the word in the prompt, even though untrained test-takers might think that.

Instead, the correct answer to a "most nearly means" question will nearly always restate some part of the relevant text.

But in some situations, rather than restate the text, the correct answer might be the only choice that demonstrates the relevant text, or is demonstrated by the relevant text.

Sometimes the College Board asks about the author's attitude, or about how a passage might be characterized, and so on. Untrained test-takers are usually tempted to answer these kinds of questions in the same way they would in literature class: they usually just read the passage and make a subjective assessment of how it makes them feel, and then look for an answer choice that describes their feelings.

But, as we've mentioned repeatedly, the SAT wouldn't be a valid, reliable standardized test if it were based on subjectivity and inference.

So, even for "attitude" questions, the answer is going to be spelled out somewhere in the text.

The SAT Reading Section always rewards us for picking answer choices that reflect what's exactly on the page, rather than trying to interpret anything we see and drawing our own conclusions.

Some SAT Reading questions ask you about the purpose of a text, or about the author's reason for doing something.

We handle these questions exactly how we handle other SAT Reading questions: we look for an answer choice that's restated or demonstrated by the relevant text, rather than trying to read the author's mind or trying to guess their intentions.

Some SAT questions may follow a pattern that I call "yes-yes-no-no," which includes the following elements:

1. The prompt asks a questions that can be answered with two opposing responses—usually "yes" or "no."

2. Two of the answer choices begin with one of the two opposing responses(like "yes"), followed by a sentence or two explaining why that response could be the correct answer.

3. The other two responses begin with the other opposing response(like "no"), followed by a sentence or two explaining why that response could be the correct answer.

As trainee test-takers, we need to remember that every part of a correct answer choice has to reflect the text, or else the choice is wrong. This applies to yes-yes-no-no questions, too,

which means the following parts of the correct answer must both be valid:

1. The "yes" or "no" part of the answer choice must be a correct answer to the question in prompt.

2. The explanation in the choice must be accurately restated or demonstrated by the relevant part of the passage.

For this reason many trained test-takers find it easier to attack these questions by focusing on the explanation portion of each answer choice, and identifying the explanations that are directly restated or demonstrated by the passage.

You'll occasionally see a question that asks you to identify the "central claim" of a passage, or of some part of a passage. You may also see questions that ask about the "central purpose" or "main idea" of a cited text, and so on. These questions can basically be treated in the same way that any other SAT Reading question can: the correct answer will be the only choice that restates an idea from the relevant part of the text.

Some questions will ask us to pick the answer choice that summarizes the cited text, or that describes the "development of the text, or something along those lines. Whenever a prompt seems to be asking for something along these lines, we'll find that the correct answer will still be restated or demonstrated by key elements of the cited text in sequence, just like the correct answer to any other kind of SAT Reading question. In other words we won't be required to interpret the cited text just because some people view summarizing as an act of interpretation.

Sometimes an answer choice will mention the idea of humor or comedy. In order to evaluate these kinds of answer choices along the lines of the SAT, we have to know that the College Board uses these terms in very particular ways that don't really reflect their use in everyday speech.

When the College Board refers to part of a passage as "humorous," "comical," funny," or anything else along those lines, we should understand that means one of two things:

1. Either the text can't be true in a literal sense, or

2. The text involves something unexpected or unusual

Sometimes the College Board asks you questions about two passages at once. These questions often ask how the author of one of the passages would respond to a statement from the other passage.

We have to remember that every answer to a Reading question is spelled out somewhere in the text, and these questions are no exception, even if they seem to be asking you to guess how an author would feel in a hypothetical situation.

Whenever the SAT asks how an author would feel about something, it must always be true that the author's passage directly states how that author feels about that topic.

When you encounter a word you don’t know instead of focusing on the part you don’t understand it can be suprisingly effective to just ignore the part of the text you don’t understand and focus on the part you do.