The SAT Prep Black Book(37)

This is one of the more challenging questions in the book, in my opinion. But, as always, we can still find a reliable answer if we stick to the rules of the test that were previously explained in this book, and read the text carefully.





Page 479, Question 17


This is one of the questions we mentioned in the discussion of “demonstration” questions. Here, the phrase “captured the dim silver glow of street lamps, bounced against sidewalks in glistening sparks, then disappeared like tiny ephemeral jewels” is a direct example of the “vivid imagery” mentioned in choice (B), because “imagery” means “visually descriptive language,” and those phrases are visual descriptions. So (B) is correct.

Some students choose (C) incorrectly here—the wording of these phrases doesn’t satisfy the College Board’s requirement for “humorous” texts, because it doesn’t describe something that can’t be taken literally. It’s possible for streetlights to have a “dim silver glow,” and it’s possible for raindrops to bounce and glisten, and it’s possible for them to be like jewels—notice the text doesn’t say raindrops are jewels, which would be impossible; it says they are “like jewels” (emphasis mine).

This question is just one more example of how important it is to read everything very carefully and to keep the unwritten rules of the SAT firmly in your mind when you work on these questions.





Page 521, Question 10


Students often miss this question because they don’t catch the connection between the phrase “robust media profits” in line 15 and the phrase “economic well-being” in choice (E), which is the correct answer. If we say that something is “robust,” we mean that it’s strong, healthy, functional, et cetera. So if profits are robust, there is economic well-being.

(A) doesn’t work because the idea of “core values” only appears in the first passage, but we were asked to find something that was only in the second passage. This is a classic type of wrong answer for a question that asks us to find something from one passage but not the other, and something you definitely have to look out for—simply misreading “passage 2” as “passage 1” or vice versa could lead you to believe that this choice was valid.

(B) doesn’t work because both texts specifically mention Rosensteil.

(C) doesn’t work because the second passage doesn’t mention the history of journalism.

(D) doesn’t work because sensationalism appears in both passages.





Page 523, Question 18


Like many challenging Passage-Based Reading question, this one is difficult because we have to read very carefully, not because we have to make any kind of inference or have very advanced vocabularies.

First, we need to look carefully to see what the text says “scientists originally thought.” We see that what they originally thought was “that the purpose of yawning was to increase the amount of oxygen in the blood or to release some accumulated carbon dioxide.”

The question asks us to find the answer choice that disproves what scientists originally thought, so we have to find the choice that disproves the idea that people yawn to increase oxygen in their blood or to release carbon dioxide.

(A) might look promising at first, because it mentions carbon dioxide and breathing rates, which appear together in the sentence that runs from lines 49 to 52.

(B) is irrelevant because it mentions sleep, and the text doesn’t say that scientists originally thought yawning had anything to do with sleep. The text just says they thought it had to do with oxygen or carbon dioxide.

(C) would be supporting what scientists originally thought: they originally thought that yawning was a mechanism to increase the amount of oxygen in the blood, and this choice says exactly that. This is a classic example of a wrong answer that does exactly the opposite of what we were asked to do. The College Board includes these types of wrong answers because they know that some students will get sort of ‘turned around’ if they’re asked to contradict something, and accidentally end up restating it.

(D) would tend to disprove what scientists thought. The text says that scientists thought people yawned because they needed to increase their blood oxygen; this choice points out that people don’t yawn very much in places where the oxygen is low. If what the scientists originally thought were correct, we would expect people in low-oxygen environments to yawn a lot, so they would get more oxygen into their blood.

(E) would also support what scientists originally thought, just like (C). One of the things that scientists originally thought was that yawning was a way to release carbon dioxide, and this choice says people yawn more when their carbon dioxide levels are higher.