The SAT Prep Black Book(151)

It’s important to understand that the reason (E) is correct has nothing to do with the passive voice. (E) is correct simply because it is the shortest answer, and it has no grammatical mistakes.

Many test-takers end up making the Writing section much more difficult for themselves than it needs to be because they reach incorrect assumptions about the test’s reasoning on certain issues, and the passive voice is one of the best examples of this type of misunderstanding. If you want to do well on the SAT, it’s not enough to know about reading, grammar, and math in real life—you have to know the rules the College Board actually follows, many of which might seem odd or counterintuitive to most test-takers. That’s what this Black Book is all about!





Page 470, Question 7


There are a lot of ways to approach this question, but the easiest one is probably to realize that (C) is the shortest answer choice and is also grammatically acceptable, so it must be right.

Just like on the previous question we talked about, many people will assume that the correct answer here is somehow related to the fact that many of the wrong answers use the passive voice. This is a tempting conclusion to reach, but it’s wrong—there are many correct answers in the College Board’s book that include the passive voice.

Remember: if the shortest answer choice has no grammatical issues, it’s right.





Page 470, Question 10


The College Board sometimes tests your awareness of idioms, and that’s what this question is doing. In fact, the issue is simply that “for all their talk” is a grammatically acceptable phrase in English.

(If “for all their talk” doesn’t make sense to you, think of it this way: the sentence is a bit like saying “even though they always talk about ecology, major companies have [blah, blah, blah].”)

The good news on this question is that an awareness of the three major patterns of Improving Sentences questions would have helped us answer this correctly, even if we didn’t know the idiom. (A) is the shortest choice, for one thing, which is often a good sign; it’s also one of the only two choices without any -ing or -ed words. It does have more short words than (C) and (D), but those two choices have weird conjunctions for this sentence—neither “besides” nor “in addition to” really makes a lot of sense in this context.

So it would be possible to work out that (A) is correct even without actually knowing the idiom being tested. It won’t always happen that knowing the patterns of the SAT can save us from not recognizing an idiom, but it will happen sometimes, clearly. I wanted to talk about this question so I could make it clear that we always have to be alert to the patterns in the answer choices, even when all hope might seem lost in the beginning.





Page 492, Question 10


This question is a good example of how important it is to read carefully and be very familiar with the test’s rules.

Many test-takers incorrectly choose (D), usually because the first part of the answer choice seems very clear and direct. But they overlook the fact that (D) ends with the word “and,” which isn’t an effective conjunction here—the SAT is picky about making sure that conjunctions are used appropriately.

People often shy away from (A) and (B) because they start with the word “because,” but we have to remember that it’s actually okay to begin a sentence with the word “because” as long as the rest of the sentence includes a portion after the comma that could stand on its own as a sentence. In other words, any time that you could create a valid sentence with the structure “X, because Y,” then it’s also okay to write “because Y, X” as long as the X part could be a sentence on its own.

So if you could say “Measuring beforehand is good because the recipes don’t allow for interruption,” then you can also say “Because the recipes don’t allow for interruption, measuring beforehand is good.” Note that everything after the comma could be set aside as a sentence on its own.

That means (B) must be right, because it’s the only choice without any grammatical issues in the eyes of the College Board.

Note that (A) has the word “having,” which often indicates a wrong answer, and (C) has the phrase “being that,” which is also often found in incorrect answers. Further, (E) has many, many short words, which is also often a sign of an incorrect answer.

Again, it’s very, very important to read things carefully and to keep the design of the test in mind!





Page 532, Question 10


This question often confuses people who think it would be more natural to use the pronoun “their.” The problem with the word “their” is that it’s a plural pronoun, but the word “band” is singular in American English—even though the band involves multiple people, the band itself is a single thing according to the SAT’s grammar rules. So we have to use the word “its.” So (A) is correct.