5. The College Board has a special rule that it sometimes invokes.
On the Critical Reading section of the SAT, the College Board will treat two ideas expressed in quick succession as though they are perfectly synonymous; if there is a negating word between those two ideas, the College Board will treat those ideas as though they are perfect antonyms. This probably doesn’t make any sense right now, but we’ll explore it in more detail later on. I just wanted to mention this issue now to make you aware of it. (By the way, this issue only comes up a few times at most on any given test, so it’s not something you need to be tremendously concerned about.)
So those are the five major reasons that most test-takers never realize that the correct answers to Passage-Based Reading questions function by directly restating the relevant portion of the text. I’ll list them again briefly, for review:
1. Test-takers aren’t even looking for restatements in the first place.
2. The College Board deliberately misleads you by using subjective phrasing.
3. You have to be extremely particular about what words actually mean.
4. Sometimes your understanding of a word you think you know might be flawed.
5. The College Board treats two ideas as synonyms if they’re stated one right after another.
Now that we’ve covered the Big Secret Of SAT Reading, which is that the correct answers to all SAT Reading questions must be spelled out on the page, you might be wondering what the wrong answers do.
Well, simply put, the wrong answers are the ones that don’t restate the passage. And the ways that they fail to restate the passage are standardized, just like every other important detail of the test, so it can be very beneficial for us to know the various ways that wrong answers tend to relate back to the text on the SAT. Let’s take a look at those in the next section.
What Do Wrong Answers Do?
We’ve already seen that the right answer to a Passage-Based Reading question on the SAT will restate the ideas from the relevant portion of the passage. But what will wrong answers do?
Broadly speaking, wrong answers are wrong because they fail to restate the relevant portion of the passage. But there are a handful of ways that the College Board creates these wrong answers—that is, there are certain specific ways in which wrong answers fail to restate the passage exactly. And it can be very helpful for us to know what those ways are.
For the purposes of illustration, we’ll use a fake question and fake wrong answers. In other words, what you see below did NOT come from a real College Board source. It came from my head. But I constructed it in the same ways that the College Board constructs its wrong answers. And later on, I’ll demonstrate my methods in action against real questions from the College Board’s Blue Book (remember, you should only ever practice with real test questions from the College Board itself).
Okay, so let’s pretend our fake sample question reads like this:
Example Question:
According to the citation, research suggests that Benjamin Franklin invented bifocals because
And let’s pretend that the relevant citation is this part of the text:
Example Citation:
. . . Researchers have shown that Benjamin Franklin’s sister was visually impaired, which might explain the amount of energy that Franklin invested in the invention of bifocals. . . .
(By the way, as far as I know, Benjamin Franklin’s sister had nothing to do with the invention of bifocals. In fact, I don’t even know if he had a sister at all. It’s an example—just go with it.)
Here are some of the various wrong answer types we might see for this kind of question.
Wrong Answer Type 1: Extra Information
In this wrong answer we find some information that was mentioned in the citation, and some information that was never mentioned in the citation at all.
Example:
his sister was having difficulty seeing the equipment that she used to run her dress shop.
In this example, the wrong answer adds information about the specific problems that the sister was having with her vision. The text never said that Franklin’s sister was specifically having trouble seeing equipment in a dress shop—just that she was having trouble seeing in general.
Wrong Answer Type 2: Direct Contradiction
This type of wrong answer directly contradicts something in the citation.
Example:
his sister’s perfect vision served as an inspiration.
Here, the wrong answer choice contradicts the cited fact that the sister has poor vision.
Wrong Answer Type 3: Complete Irrelevance
This type of wrong answer has absolutely nothing to do with the cited text. These wrong answers can actually be very tempting to a lot of test-takers. People can’t believe the SAT would offer them an answer choice that’s obviously wrong, but that’s exactly what the test does. Remember, too, that a lot of test-takers are interpreting the text as though it were a piece of literature in an English class, and most students are taught in school not to reject any interpretation completely. So the College Board exploits your natural tendency to give the benefit of the doubt to anything that doesn’t directly contradict the text by providing some wrong answers that have nothing to do with the text whatsoever.