What About Paired Passages?
Sometimes the College Board asks you questions about two passages at once. These questions often ask how the author of one passage would respond to a statement from the other passage. When this happens, students often worry that they need to read an author’s mind, which seems very subjective and unfair.
But we have to remember that every answer to a Passage-Based Reading question is spelled out somewhere in the text, and these questions are no exception, even if they seem to be asking you to guess how an author would feel.
To answer these kinds of questions, we have to find a point in the text where the author we’re being asked about discusses something that appears in the other passage, and then choose an answer that reflects that author’s opinion on the subject.
This might sound a little complicated, but it’s actually not that bad. Let’s use a fake example to demonstrate how it works for now, and then you can see some real examples a few pages from now when I go through some questions from the Blue Book.
Imagine that a question asks how the author of passage 1 would respond to the views of the author of passage 2 on the subject of education. Let’s say that passage 2 contains this sentence: “Formal education is vastly overrated.” Finally, let’s imagine that passage 1 contains this sentence: “People who criticize formal education are usually the ones who need it most.”
In this imaginary scenario, the correct answer might say that the author of passage 1 “believes that the author of Passage 2 would benefit from further education.” Two reasons combine to make this the right answer. First, this answer choice restates passage 1’s claim that people who criticize formal education are in need of formal education; second, passage 2 criticizes formal education when it says that formal education is overrated. In other words, the text of passage 2 shows that its author would be one of the very people that the author of passage 1 discusses in his own passage.
Conclusion
So far, we’ve talked about the general processes for answering a wide range of Passage-Based Reading questions on the SAT. Adhering to the approach I’ve described here will get you through the vast majority of real test questions that you’ll ever see on the SAT.
But there are a few questions that will involve one or two further considerations that you’ll also need to be aware of. Let’s talk about them in the next section.
Special Cases: Parallelism And Demonstration
As I’ve explained, the College Board had to lay down some ground rules when it created the Passage-Based Reading questions in order to make them work as valid multiple-choice questions that could be administered on a large scale. One of those ground rules was the Big Secret of Passage-Based Reading that we’ve been discussing for several pages now: the idea that the correct answer to a Passage-Based Reading question will be the only answer that says the same thing as the relevant part of the text.
Two other ground rules are a bit more obscure, and the College Board only uses them a few times on an average test. The first of these rules has to do with something I call “parallelism,” and it says that two ideas stated in succession can be treated as exact synonyms if a question asks about them, even though they aren’t synonyms in real life. If two ideas are stated in quick succession and they have some kind of negating phrase between them, then we should treat those two ideas as exact antonyms for the purpose of the SAT, even though they wouldn’t have to be antonyms in real life.
This particular idea is too bizarre for me to feel comfortable making up a fake example, so in this case I’ll use an example from the College Board’s Official SAT Study Guide. The example is on page 392, starting at the middle of line 41, where the sentence reads, “Shadowy imaginings do not usually hold up in the light of real experience.” In that sentence, using the College Board’s way of looking at these things, we should know that the phrase “shadowy imaginings” can be thought of as the antonym of the phrase “real experience,” even though “shadowy” isn’t an exact antonym of “real” and “imaginings” isn’t an exact antonym of “experience” in everyday speech. When question 13 on that page asks about the phrase “shadowy imaginings,” we’re supposed to realize that it means something opposite to “real experience,” and choose “unsubstantiated” (because “un” is a negating prefix and “substantiated” can mean “real”).
If you think that sounds like a little technical and complicated, you’re right, it does. But the questions involving this parallelism idea pretty much always end up being complicated like that—they’re often the hardest questions for students to answer. Luckily, there aren’t going to be that many of them on any one test.