So that leaves us with (B) and (E) as grammatically acceptable options according to the SAT. Now we need to figure out which option has the best style according to the College Board. We can use the style patterns from the Improving Sentences questions for that. We see that (E) is shorter, has fewer words ending in “-ed,” and has fewer words that are less than 5 letters long.
So (E) will be the choice that the College Board says is correct.
Page 473, Question 33
This question is essentially a Passage-Based Reading question, so we’re just looking for the answer choice that describes the first paragraph of the essay.
(A) is the correct answer because the verb “elaborate” means to discuss something in detail, and the “view” being discussed in detail in the first paragraph is the view that these remakes are “disrespectful and a waste of time and money.” The rest of the essay then “contrasts” with that view.
(B) is wrong because no personal experience is included in the first paragraph—the author never says, “I went to see movie X and this is what I thought . . .”
(C) is wrong because the first paragraph does mention what some modern critics have thought, but it doesn’t analyze what they’ve thought. For this answer to be correct, the text would need to discuss the motivations and repercussions of modern criticism, which it doesn’t do.
(D) is wrong because there is no introduction, and the passage isn’t about any kind of approach to writing fiction.
(E) is wrong because the text never mentions playfulness.
Page 536, Question 30
This question is essentially an Improving Sentences question. To answer it, we’ll find the version of the sentence with acceptable grammar and the most ideal stylistic choices.
The shortest answer choice for this question is (E), and it’s grammatically acceptable. So it’s going to be the right answer . . . as long as the word “it” at the beginning of the sentence is referring to a singular noun from the previous sentence. So we check the previous sentence, and confirm that the word “it” in sentence 2 is referring to the word “camp” from sentence 1. So (E) checks out as the correct answer.
Page 536, Question 32
This question probably looks pretty bizarre, but it’s actually asking us to use the same kinds of paraphrasing skills we would use in a Passage-Based Reading question. The correct answer here is (D), because this sentence restates the ideas in sentence 5: “live together” in sentence 8 is the same thing as “eat and play together, share bunkhouses.”
Page 536, Question 34
These types of questions are often confusing for untrained test-takers, but we should know by now that we’re going to answer this by applying the rules and patterns from the Improving Sentences questions, particularly the patterns about making sentences as short as possible, avoiding words ending in “-ing” and “-ed,” and avoiding short words.
Only (C) would bring the sentence more in line with those patterns, by swapping an “-ing” word (“being”) and a short word (“that”) for the word “since.” (A) and (B) would only make the sentence longer, (D) would have no real effect, and (E) would create a grammatical mistake.
This question is just one more great example of how important it is to be aware of the subtle patterns on the SAT!
Page 603, Question 31
At first, this question looks like it’s basically an Improving Sentences question. If we look carefully, though, we’ll see that many of the answer choices seem grammatically and stylistically okay from the College Board’s standpoint, but no two answer choices express exactly the same idea. That means we also need to bring in some Reading Comprehension skills to see which answer choice is restating the concepts in the original sentence.
One thing that’s very important to realize here is that the second sentence is saying that the worker needs to “assume responsibility.” We know this because the second sentence says “he or she” should assume it, and “he or she” can only refer to a singular noun. The only singular noun in the previous sentence is the word “worker,” so the worker needs to do the assuming.
(D) might seem like a good answer choice, but (D) actually says that the only workers who need to assume responsibility are the ones “whose employers are familiar.” The original text doesn’t say that, though—it says that any worker should assume responsibility.
(B) is the only answer choice that gets that relationship exactly right, because it says that all workers need to assume responsibility, just like the original version of sentence 3.