The SAT Prep Black Book(152)

Some people aren’t comfortable with the word “its” because they aren’t sure if it should be spelled with an apostrophe. But that isn’t anything we need to worry about on the SAT—the SAT doesn’t try to mislead you by testing spelling. (The ACT, on the other hand, does try to mislead you with those kinds of issues, so if you’re going to take the ACT make sure you’re aware of that distinction.)





Page 532, Question 11


The College Board likes to insist on a kind of parallelism in these kinds of questions, so we have to make sure that we pick the exact right words to satisfy the SAT’s grammar rules.

In this case, the phrase “twice as many” is the first half of the structure “twice as many X as Y.” So we need an answer choice that begins with the word “as.”

That gets us down to (A) and (B). Now it’s time to complete the parallel structure: note that the original sentence says the birds “inhabit” something. That makes (B) correct.

Another way to approach this question would be to say that the College Board requires comparisons like “twice as many X as Y” to be made between similar things. Since the first half of the sentence is talking about the number of birds that inhabit an area, the second half of the sentence must also mention those words.





Page 554, Question 10


This is yet another example of a question that will needlessly confuse many test-takers who get intimidated by the number of words in each answer choice.

If we jump right to the shortest answer choice, which is (B), we see that it’s grammatically acceptable, which means it must be correct. (Remember, as I’ve mentioned repeatedly, that it’s okay for a sentence to begin with the word “because” if the words after the comma could stand on their own as a sentence.)

One other thing: it’s not okay to say something like “because X is the reason why . . .” in the way that the original version of this sentence does. In those cases, you should just say, “X is the reason why,” or “because X,” as choice (B) does. (A), (C), and (E) all violate this principle in various ways.





Page 599, Question 1


This is another of the College Board’s comparison questions, so we should look very carefully to make sure that similar things are being compared in the correct answer.

The first half of the sentence talks about visiting places “in Great Britain,” so the second half needs to talk about things “in Canada”—this way, both phrases contain the word “in.” So (E) is correct.

Remember that the answers will always be clear if we keep the test’s rules in mind and read carefully.





Page 599, Question 3


Test-takers are often surprised to find that (B) is grammatically correct, because the phrase “as does” strikes them as odd.

But we should remember that the College Board requires a certain kind of parallelism with the word “as” when we’re comparing two things, so the underlined portion will need to include that word (since the first half of the sentence uses it). That gets us down to (A) and (B). From there, we should recall that the test requires us to compare similar things—in this case, the campus “newspaper” must be compared to the hometown “newspaper,” not to the hometown itself. So (B) is correct.





Page 600, Question 6


There are a lot of subtle things that we need to make sure we catch in order to answer this question correctly.

One of the most often overlooked issues with this question is the fact that the first verb in the correct answer needs to agree with the word “reasons,” not with the word “process.” So the verb needs to be “are,” not “is.”

That means (A) and (D) are out.

From a grammatical standpoint, we could actually say that (C) is the only grammatically correct option, since the two “reasons” need to be noun phrases, and since putting the word “that” in front of a verb phrase makes it into a noun phrase. In other words, the phrases “that they have . . .” and “that they work . . .” actually function as nouns in (C).

Other people might try to appeal to a sense of parallelism to explain why (C) is correct, but I think it’s important to avoid appealing to parallelism whenever possible on the SAT—I try to limit its use in my explanations to questions that involve comparing two or more things. (The reason for this is that students can get kind of obsessed with the idea of parallelism and try to apply it everywhere, with disastrous results, if I’m not very careful about laying down strict rules.)





Page 600, Question 9


There are a lot of important things to note in this question.