The SAT Prep Black Book(157)

3. Consider using the Passage-Based Reading Approach to answer the question.


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!)





4. Use the appropriate basic concept to answer the question.


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





Conclusion


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!





The Recommended Step-By-Step Approach To Improving SAT Paragraphs In Action


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.





Page 411, Question 30


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) is wrong because medieval history isn’t already mentioned in the paragraph.

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

(C) is correct.

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

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





Page 411, Question 31


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) doesn’t work because labor isn’t mentioned in either sentence.

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

(C) works 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) doesn’t work because neither kings nor property nor feudalism appears in sentences 3 and 4.

(E) doesn’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.”





Page 411, Question 32


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.