This might sound a little ridiculous, but let’s think about this from the College Board’s standpoint:
1. The College Board needs the SAT to include multiple-choice questions about passages.
2. The College Board needs to avoid any ambiguity and interpretation in order for the SAT to fulfill its role as a legitimate, reliable standardized test. (See my blog article on the purpose of standardized tests for more on this, at www.TestingIsEasy.com)
3. The only way to discuss a text without interpreting it is to restate it.
All of this leads to one conclusion:
4. The College Board has designed the correct answer choices on the SAT Critical Reading section to restate the texts.
At this point, you might be wondering something very important: if it really is as simple as I say, how can it be that so many intelligent people take the test every year without ever noticing that the correct answer to each question says exactly the same thing as the text they’re reading?
This is a very good question. There are five reasons why most test-takers never notice how Passage-Based Reading questions work, and you need to know them are so you can prevent them from affecting you negatively:
1. Most students aren’t even looking for an answer choice to be stated directly in the text.
Most SAT-takers are used to analyzing everything they read the way an English teacher would want, so when they read the passages on the SAT they try to analyze them automatically. In other words, most test-takers wouldn’t even notice if an answer choice restated the text, because it never occurs to them to look for that. This is just one more way in which most test-takers are their own worst enemies.
2. The College Board deliberately phrases questions to make you think you should use subjective interpretation to find the answer.
If you’ve ever seen any real College Board reading questions, you’ve definitely seen that they use words like “primarily,” “probably,” “suggests,” and so on, like this: “The author’s use of the word ‘miscreant’ in line 14 primarily suggests which of the following?” The College Board deliberately phrases questions in this way to mislead you and get you to interpret the text. They want you to think that two or three answer choices might all be equally reasonable. So we have to learn to ignore words like “primarily” and “suggests.” That’s right: we ignore those words completely. When I read a question like “In line 10, the author primarily suggests which of the following?” I treat that question as though it said, “Which of the following ideas appears directly in the text somewhere close to line 10?”
3. We sometimes have to be extremely particular about the exact meanings of words, both in the text and in the answer choice.
The College Board can get very picky about the specific meanings of words. As a result, test-takers often conclude, incorrectly, that more than one answer choice restates the passage. One classic example of this from a real SAT involved a text that mentioned dolphins sharing certain abilities with “very few animals”—one of the wrong answers said dolphins had “unique” talents. But the answer with “unique” was wrong, because the word “unique” doesn’t just mean that something is rare: in the strictest sense of the word, “unique” means that something is literally “one-of-a-kind,” and unlike anything else. In a school setting, if you used the word “unique” in a loose way to mean “rare,” most teachers wouldn’t notice or care. But on the SAT, the difference between “unique” and “rare” can be the difference between right and wrong. So if you want to make a perfect score on the Reading section, you’ll have to learn to attack every single word that you read, and you’ll have to make sure you’re only considering exactly what the word means, instead of working from your generalized assumptions about what it might mean, or what you think it implies. The College Board splits hairs when it comes to these things, and if you want to score high you’ll have to learn to split them too.
4. Test-takers are sometimes mistaken about what words mean.
No matter how strong your vocabulary is, there are some words that you use incorrectly. I promise you this—it happens to all of us. Sometimes the differences are subtle. For example, I once had a student who mistakenly thought that “shrewd” had a strong negative connotation. He correctly understood that it involved being clever and intelligent, but incorrectly thought that it indicated a certain type of calculating evil. For this reason, he didn’t pick an answer choice with the word “shrewd” since he didn’t see anything in the text that reflected a negative connotation, and he missed the question. On the other hand, sometimes the differences are huge, and a little embarrassing—I always thought the word “pied” meant something like “renowned” or “famous,” because of the story of the Pied Piper. But it actually means that a person wears clothes made of patches and rags. Needless to say, I drew a complete blank when a test question mentioned the word “pied” and my understanding of that word didn’t match with anything on the page. Don’t think that memorizing vocabulary words will help correct these issues—for reasons I’ll discuss later, memorizing vocab might even contribute to making more of them. Just know that it’s something you might be confronted with at some point. If you’re looking at a question and none of the answer choices seems to restate the passage, the bottom line is that you’ve made a mistake somewhere.