The SAT Prep Black Book(158)

In the first version, “medieval castles” are compared to “royal palaces,” but the structure of the second version makes us compare “medieval castles” to “comforts.”

This is one more example of the supreme importance of reading everything on the SAT very carefully and keeping the rules of the test in mind.

(D) doesn’t work because the original text says that castles had dungeons and drafty living quarters “instead of” comforts. But this choice would be saying that castles didn’t offer comforts outside of dungeons and drafty quarters. In other words, this choice is saying that there are some comforts to be found in dungeons and drafty quarters, instead of saying that those things exist instead of comforts.

(E) is correct because it says that castles offered few comforts, and that castles had dungeons and drafty quarters, and that some comforts could be found in royal palaces.

Again, this is a very good example of the way we sometimes need to read very carefully to be able to separate a wrong answer from a correct answer.





Page 411, Question 33


For this question, we need a word that demonstrates the relationship among the ideas in sentence 9. Since sentence 9 talks about keeping people away and about attracting visitors, we want a word like “ironically,” so (C) is correct. (Remember that the College Board uses the word “ironic” to describe a situation in which two ideas contradict one another—in this case, the idea of keeping people away contradicts the idea of attracting people.) (D) doesn’t work because it would establish a contrast between sentence 8 and sentence 9, not a contrast between the ideas in sentence 9 itself.





Page 412, Question 34


For this question, we need to insert an idea that restates concepts from the paragraph. (D) is correct because it restates ideas from sentence 12, since “crumbling away” goes with “decaying,” and “relative obscurity” goes with “ordinary street.” No other answer choice restates ideas from the paragraph. (A) comes close when it mentions the idea of being “obsolete,” but (A) says that there are some castles that aren’t obsolete, while sentence 8 says that “castles were made obsolete.” In other words, (A) contradicts the text.





Page 412, Question 35


Again, we want a sentence that restates a concept from sentence 12, almost as though this were a Passage-Based Reading question. Choice (B) is correct because the word “there” in the answer choice goes with “in one village,” “medieval austerity” in the answer choice goes with “castle,” and “modern comfort” in the answer choice goes with “cozy . . . houses.”





Conclusion


This was pretty small set of questions, but that’s because there are only 6 of these questions on each test anyway. We’ll move on to some of the harder ones from the Blue Book in the next section. And remember that you can see a free selection of video solutions to SAT questions at www.SATprepVideos.com.





Selection of Challenging Questions


We’ve just finished answering a whole test’s worth of Improving Paragraphs questions. Now let’s take a look through the College Board’s Blue Book (the Official SAT Study Guide) and talk about some of the challenging Improving Paragraphs questions from the rest of the book.

We’ll find that all of the other Improving Paragraphs questions rely on the same basic concepts from the Improving Sentences questions and the Passage-Based Reading questions that we’ve already discussed elsewhere in this book; our job as test-takers is really just to look for opportunities to apply those principles on each new question. Following along with these solutions in your copy of the Blue Book will help you continue to improve your performance on Improving Paragraphs questions.

As with all the other question explanations in this book, you’ll need a copy of the second edition of the “Blue Book” to follow along. Let’s get started!





Page 473, Question 30


This question is basically an Improving Sentences question. That means we should choose the answer that combines correct grammar with the most ideal stylistic patterns (all according to the College Board, of course).

The original version of the sentence isn’t grammatically acceptable because it’s a comma splice—in other words, it incorrectly uses a comma to join two sets of words that could each stand as complete sentences on their own. Choice (B) is grammatically okay. Choice (C) is grammatically unacceptable, since it would technically be making the “version” the thing that was doing the “expecting.” Choice (D) is almost grammatically acceptable, but putting the word “these” in a new sentence introduces some ambiguity: “these” might refer to the plural word “reviews” or to the plural word “purists.” (E) is grammatically acceptable because the comma after “purists” makes it clear that the phrase “those who expect” is referring to that word.