The SAT Prep Black Book(38)

So on a first read-through, you might end up kind of liking both (A) and (D). Now it’s time to scrutinize those two choices and see which one ends up working, and which one has a flaw. (A) talks about breathing rates, but the text only tells us what scientists thought about yawning. The idea of breathing faster is mentioned later in the paragraph, but not as part of what “scientists originally thought” in line 46. So now we have to ask ourselves whether a breathing rate is the same thing as a yawn. The answer is no, it isn’t. While yawning might be related to breathing rates if we tried to force ourselves to see a connection between them, the fact remains that the text says scientists had a belief about the purpose of yawning, not a belief about how anything affected the breathing rate per se. So, after careful consideration, we see that (A) was never actually a direct fit with the text, while (D) talks about people in a low-oxygen environment not yawning a lot, which would contradict the idea that people yawn because they need more oxygen. So (D) is the correct answer.





Page 538, Question 7


This is one of the questions that students ask about more than any other. Most people who answer it incorrectly choose (E). The paragraph does describe the author’s childhood artistic endeavors, and the author’s desire to be a “Renaissance artist,” but the text does not specifically say that it was the wish to be a Renaissance artist that led to a “devotion to visual arts.” There are at least two major problems with this phrase.

First, the author indicates that he was drawing and painting before he began writing poems, and he seems to be equating writing poems with the desire to be a Renaissance artist, so that desire can’t be the thing that “initiated a devotion to the visual arts,” since he was already devoted to the visual arts before he had the desire to write poems.

Second, the phrase “visual arts” doesn’t fit with the author’s explanation of what it means to be a “Renaissance artist.” The author says that being such an artist involves writing, painting, composing, and inventing; from that list, only painting is a “visual art.” So the desire to be a Renaissance artist must involve more than the desire to devote oneself to the “visual arts.”

(C) ends up being correct because of the parenthetical phrase “too seriously!” in the original text. We have to read really carefully here, and we have to be somewhat aware of the meanings of the words “naïve” and “grandiose” (or we have to be able to realize that the other four choices don’t work). People often think “naïve” can only mean “inexperienced,” but it can also mean something along the lines of “sincere” or “direct.” This goes with the idea of being “serious.” The word “grandiose” in this context indicates that someone has an exaggerated sense of his own abilities or importance, and the word “too” in the text before “seriously” indicates that the author considers his youthful commitment to have been excessive.

Finally, the word “ambition” from the answer choices goes with the part of the text that says the author “wanted to be a Renaissance artist.” Remember that the College Board wants us to treat ideas stated in succession as though they were synonyms, so the author’s statement about wanting to be an artist can be taken into consideration for this question.

It’s subtle, but it’s there: the phrase “too seriously!” matches with the words “naïve and grandiose,” and the word “ambition” matches with the phrase “I wanted to be.”

Remember, as always, that it’s absolutely critical to pay attention to details in answer choices and in the relevant parts of the text!





Page 540, Question 12


This question often seems weird to students because they have a hard time seeing how a “monster” can be a “process.” But we have to remember that answering these questions is always a matter of seeing exactly what’s in the text, and the text here says that “everything . . . issues . . . from a benign monster called manufacture,” which means the “benign monster” is the source of “everything.” (The verb “to issue from” means “to come from” in this case.) So the text says that everything comes from this “benign monster,” which is why (C) is right when it says we’re talking about the process by which these goods come into existence.





Page 577, Question 9


This is one of the best questions in the entire Blue Book when it comes to demonstrating the various ways that the College Board can make an answer choice wrong even though it might sound like an intelligent analysis of the text.