The SAT Prep Black Book(31)

The other ground rule I’d like to talk about is the idea of demonstration. Sometimes—not often, but sometimes—the College Board expects you to identify a correct answer because it technically describes something that the text demonstrates, rather than restating it. One example appears on page 479 of the same book, in question 17. That question asks about lines 4 through 8 of the text, and the correct answer to the question mentions “vivid imagery.” This answer is correct because the citation includes this sentence: “Raindrops . . . bounced against sidewalks in glistening sparks, then disappeared like tiny ephemeral jewels.” This sentence is a demonstration of imagery, not a collection of words that mean the same thing as the word “imagery.” Again, the College Board rarely asks questions of this type, but it’s important to be aware that it may occasionally do so.





The Passage-Based Reading Process In Action Against Real Questions


To prove that the SAT Passage-Based Reading process works against real SAT questions like the ones you’ll see on test day, and to help you learn how to use that process on your own, we’ll go through all the Passage-Based Reading questions for the first Critical Reading section of the first test in the second edition of the College Board’s Blue Book, The Official SAT Study Guide. You’ll need a copy of that book to follow along. (Really, you’ll need a copy anyway, since it’s the only printed source of real SAT test questions—all printed practice tests from third-party prep companies contain fake tests that might not follow the same rules as the real test.) You can find a good deal on it here: http://www.SATprepBlackBook.com/blue-book.

We’ll do the Passage-Based Reading questions starting on page 391 of The Official SAT Study Guide, second edition, since page 391 is the beginning of the first Critical Reading section in the first practice test in that book. After we go through those questions, we’ll go through the entire College Board book and do a selection of questions that students have traditionally found challenging from other sections in other practice tests.

(If you would like to see some video demonstrations of these ideas, go to www.SATprepVideos.com for a selection of demonstration videos that are free to readers of this book.)





Page 391, Question 6


This is bit of a doozy to start off with, but oh well :)

First, let’s talk about why the wrong answers are wrong:

(A) is irrelevant to the passage. A lot of students will assume that making mistakes is automatically human, but the text never mentions anyone making a mistake or doing anything wrong, so this can’t be the answer.

(B) is irrelevant because the text doesn’t mention company—it never says whether other people are present with the speaker or not.

(C) is irrelevant. It’s true that the descriptions of nature are in the past tense, but the statement “It felt good to be human” is also in the past tense. Within the context of the passage, then, the good feeling of being human is happening at the same time as the rest of the paragraph.

(D) is correct—we’ll talk more about it below.

(E) doesn’t work because the text never mentions simplicity, nor a lack of complication, nor any other phrase that could mean the same thing as the word “simplicity.” It would be a common mistake for students to assume that the author thinks nature is simple, but on the SAT we must avoid these kinds of assumptions. We have to stick to the exact wording of the text, and the exact wording of the text never mentions any idea synonymous with the word “simplicity.”

Now let’s talk about why (D) is correct. The text mentions the “wondrous spectacle” of the “night sky.” The “night sky” is a natural thing, and the phrase “wondrous spectacle” is an appreciative, positive way to describe something that must be a visually appealing scene (because “wondrous” is positive and a “spectacle” is a visual scene), so the “night sky[‘s]” “wondrous spectacle” is an example of “nature’s beauty.” That part is fairly straightforward. What might not be so obvious is why we can use those phrases from line 10 when the question asks us about line 12.

To figure this out, we need to remember the College Board’s unstated policy on ideas that appear consecutively in the text. This text talks about horses wandering past the speaker; the horses never look up at the “wondrous spectacle” of “the night sky,” but the speaker does. The next sentence says “it feels good to be human.” In SAT-code, this means that “to be human” is to do the opposite of what the horses do, and the horses aren’t looking up. Thus, “to be human” and to notice “the wondrous spectacle” of “the night sky” must be the same thing in the College Board’s way of thinking.