(C) doesn’t work because of the word “ambivalent.”
(D) is correct.
(E) doesn’t work because of the word “nations.” The text talks about Africans and about African Americans, but Africa is a continent, not a “nation,” and African-Americans are a demographic group within the United States, not a “nation.” Remember that every word has to fit!
When students miss this question, they almost always choose (E), and with good reason: (E) only differs from the text by one word, “nation.” In fact, I would bet that if you were discussing this passage with a college professor and you accidentally referred to the groups in the text as nations, she wouldn’t stop to correct you. (E) would be a fine remark to make in most classroom settings, but it’s completely wrong on the SAT because it doesn’t exactly match the original text. Remember to pay attention to details when you work on the SAT!
Page 392, Question 11
This one is hard for a lot of students. The “message” is that “ties . . . must be maintained . . . if a people is to survive.” When you tell someone that they must do something in order to survive, you are cautioning them. (B) is the right answer for this reason.
(A) doesn’t work because there is no criticism here. This part of the text doesn’t mention anyone or anything being bad.
(B) is correct.
(C) might be tempting if it does happen to strike a reader as “questionable” that a tree can’t stand without its roots, but we always have to remember that the correct answer will restate a concept from the text; our own impressions and interpretations of the text don’t matter.
(D) doesn’t work because no phrase in the text indicates nostalgia, and the message itself isn’t described as being a fond memory.
(E) doesn’t work because the message is not “optimistic,” since it does not express hope for the future.
Page 392, Question 12
This question asks about a really bizarre proverb that students are unlikely to understand in any kind of clear way. Remember that, for these questions and for every question, we have to put aside our own interpretations and find the answer in the text. The text specifically says that the proverb “conveys the . . . instinctive pull of one’s heritage [and] curiosity in our origins.” This goes with (C), an interest in personal history. Note that “inherent” from the answer choice matches “instinctive” from the text, just as “interest in their history” goes with “curiosity in our origins.” The rest of the answer choices don’t reflect what the text says the maxim conveys. Many of the wrong answers might seem like decent literary or sociological interpretations if we were discussing this text in a real class, which is one more reason why we have to remember to stick to the stated message of the text for every single question.
Page 392, Question 13
This question was previously discussed in the section on parallelism. Here, we have to remember to read the text very carefully. The text says that “shadowy imaginings” don’t stand up to “real experience.” So “shadowy imaginings” and “real experience” are opposites as far as the College Board is concerned, because they are mentioned in quick succession and have a negating phrase between them.
Once we realize that the test wants us to treat “real experience” as the opposite of “shadowy imaginings,” we realize that “shadowy” must be the opposite of “real,” as far as the SAT is concerned. Now we have to find a word in the answer choices that can mean the opposite of the word “real.” The only possible option is “unsubstantiated,” because “substantiated” can mean “real” and “un” is a negating prefix. So the correct answer is (E).
The four wrong answers here might all sound like decent interpretations of the word “shadowy” in a literary sense, which is why it’s so important for us to remember that we have to find the correct answer stated plainly in the text itself.
In my opinion, this question is one of the hardest ones in the whole book when it comes to analyzing the text and the answer choices. Some test-takers get the question right just through lucky guessing, but the process of working out the correct answer with certainty requires a high degree of familiarity with the test and attention to detail.
Page 393, Question 14
For this one, the phrase “wondered if we hadn’t been mistaken” goes with the ideas of “uncertainty” and “doubt” in (C) and (E). It does not go with “fear,” “anger,” or “regret” from the other choices. (Be careful here—a lot of people might want to say that “uncertainty” goes with “regret,” but those two ideas aren’t actually the same if we think carefully about them. “Uncertainty” indicates a state in which we aren’t sure of something, but “regret” indicates a state in which we feel bad about something.)