The SAT Prep Black Book(29)

Don’t worry too much about these types of questions. For one thing, reading closely and paying attention to relationships will make these questions pretty easy. For another thing, there aren’t many questions like this on any given test, anyway.





What About “Except” Questions?


Some questions seem to take the normal question-answering process and turn it on its head, often by using the word “except.” Such a question might say something like “all of the following are found in Passage 1 EXCEPT . . .”.

For a question like this, we’re still going to read the relevant portion of the text carefully, but now the correct answer is going to be the only choice that does NOT appear in the passage.

It’s always important to make sure you read all five answer choices for every question (it helps you catch mistakes). But it’s ESPECIALLY important on these “except” questions because students often accidentally forget about the “except” and just choose the first choice that does appear in the text, and get the question wrong. If you accidentally overlook the word “except” but still read all five answer choices, you have a better chance of noticing your mistake.





What About “Vocabulary In Context” Questions?


Some questions ask you how a word is used in the passage. They often read something like this: “In line 14, the word ‘sad’ most nearly means . . .”

For these questions, just like for all the others, we’re ultimately looking for an answer choice that restates something from the passage—and not just one that restates the original word in the question, because usually all the choices will do that in one sense or another. Instead, we need a word that restates an idea from the surrounding text. In the imaginary question above, if the text said, “The dilapidated old warehouse was in a sad state by the time the inspector closed it for safety reasons,” then the correct answer would be something like “worn out,” because “worn out” means the same thing as “dilapidated” in this context. In this hypothetical scenario, a choice like “weepy” wouldn’t be supported by the text, even though it can be a synonym for the word “sad” in other situations.





What About Humor, Metaphor, And Irony?


Sometimes an answer choice will mention the idea of humor, metaphor, or irony. In order to evaluate these kinds of answer choices along SAT lines, we have to know that the College Board uses these terms in very particular ways that don’t really reflect their use in everyday speech.

When the College Board refers to part of a passage as “humorous,” “comical,” “funny,” or anything else along those lines, we should understand that to mean that the text cannot be true in a literal sense. For instance, if the text says something like “when I found out we would have homework over the vacation I was the mayor of Angrytown,” then the College Board might refer to that remark as humorous, because the speaker wasn’t really made the mayor of a place called Angrytown just because he found out about a test. Whether a real person would actually laugh at something doesn’t matter on the SAT; all that matters is whether the text describes something that couldn’t literally happen.

“Metaphor” is another word that the College Board uses differently from most modern speakers. On the SAT, when a question or answer choice refers to a metaphor, it’s referring to any non-literal use of a term. If a sentence in an SAT passage said, “she ran as fast as lightning,” then the correct answer might describe this as a metaphor, since a person cannot literally run as fast as lightning.

When the College Board refers to something as “ironic,” we should understand that the text describes some kind of contradiction. If the text said, “John was working in a butcher’s shop even though he never ate meat,” a correct answer choice on the SAT might describe this as irony, because the ideas of a butcher shop and an aversion to meat are somewhat contradictory. This isn’t really a proper use of the term “irony” in real life, but if you keep this idea of contradiction in mind when encountering the word “irony” on the Passage-Based Reading questions, you should be fine.

As long as you keep those specialized meanings in your head and apply them when the test mentions the concepts of humor, metaphor, or irony, you should still find that the correct answers to those questions match up with the relevant text.

(By the way, if this all seems a little much right now, don’t worry—we’ll see plenty of examples of these ideas at work in real SAT questions from the College Board’s Blue Book in just a bit.)