The SAT Prep Black Book(160)

Remember that it’s absolutely critical to read things carefully and to think about the rules of the SAT! If you commit to doing that on each question, you’ll be nearly unstoppable.





Page 604, Question 33


This question is essentially an Improving Sentences question. The shortest answer choice is (D), but it has a grammatical mistake: it results in a sentence fragment. So now let’s think about other patterns.

(A) is a run-on sentence, so it can’t be right.

(B) is pretty awkward, but let’s try to quantify what’s actually wrong with it (just calling something “awkward” is too subjective to be a reliable approach). It has 9 short words (which are words less than 5 letters long, as I mentioned in our discussion of the patterns to look out for on Improving Sentences questions).

(C) has 7 short words, along with 1 “-ing” word.

(E) has 5 short words and 1 “-ing” word.

So the answer choice with the fewest offensive words (according to the College Board’s unwritten rules and patterns) is choice (E), which means (E) will be correct. It’s grammatically acceptable and does the best job of conforming to the College Board’s patterns of preferring the fewest short words and the fewest “-ed” or “-ing” words possible.

Just to be crystal clear, I’d like to reiterate that there’s nothing actually wrong with short words or

“-ing” words in real life. The reason we care about them on the SAT is that the College Board generally doesn’t like to see those kinds of words in correct answers on Improving Sentences questions. Once more we see the extreme importance of knowing the unique rules that the test follows.





Page 661, Question 30


This question is basically a Passage-Based Reading question, so we’ll answer it by reading carefully and avoiding any kind of subjective interpretation.

(A) works because the “possible response” might be that a person who reads sentence 1 wonders if “microphones” are involved, since sentence 1 mentions “listening in.”

(B) might seem tempting, but the second sentence doesn’t actually provide “historical background” for sentence 1. It does provide a historical fact, but it doesn’t provide background for sentence 1 because sentence 1 isn’t set in the historical time period mentioned in sentence 2. Sentence 2 is talking about how things were in the middle ages, but sentence 1 is talking about “this summer.”

(C) is wrong because no idea is repeated.

(D) is wrong because no contrasting view is mentioned. The first sentence says the author “felt as if” something was happened, while the second sentence says that thing could not literally have happened. But the first sentence doesn’t say that anything did happen—it just says the author felt like it happened. So there’s no actual contrast here.

(E) is wrong for the same reason (D) is. It would have been inaccurate to say that the writer really was listening in on the middle age, but that’s not what sentence 1 says—sentence 1 just says the writer “felt as if” that was happening, which isn’t necessarily an inaccurate statement.

This question is one more example of the importance of reading every word carefully. (Now that this book is almost over, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve come back to the idea of reading everything carefully roughly a million times. There’s a reason for that. Reading everything carefully is the single most important thing we can do as SAT-takers.)





Page 661, Question 35


This is basically a Passage-Based Reading question, so we’ll answer it by looking carefully at the text.

(A) appears in the passage in places like sentence 6, when the author gives “background information” on the practical realities of traveling in the middle ages.

(B) would be kind of troubling to me: there’s definitely description, but how can we know for sure if the College Board thinks the description is “imaginative?” I would put this answer aside and keep looking to see what the other choices are. If one of the other choices clearly isn’t in the passage, then we’ll know that must be right, and we’ll know that the College Board apparently considers this kind of description to be “imaginative.”

(C) is clearly not anywhere in the passage—not only are there no “rhetorical questions,” but there aren’t any questions at all, of any kind. There are no question marks. So we now know that (C) is the thing missing from the text, and (B) must be present in the text. This means (C) is correct, since the question asked us to find the one choice that wasn’t present in the passage.

(D) is in the text because the entire passage is narrated in the first person.