The correct answer here is (C). The word “insights” goes with “penetrating intuition;” the word “character” goes with “female heart” (“heart” is meant in the sense of “core” or “essence,” not in the anatomical sense); the phrase “in his everyday life” goes with “the real man.” The text says that people who were drawn to him because of his insight into people’s hearts were surprised that the real man was actually insensitive; the answer choice says that Balzac’s knowledge of character wasn’t present in his everyday life.
Now let’s talk about a couple of the wrong answers, and what makes them wrong. Pay special attention here, because this question has some uniquely frustrating wrong answers.
(A) is basically the opposite of the text—the text says that female readers were drawn to him.
(B) is basically the opposite of an earlier part of the text. Line 2 says Balzac’s fiction was “financially wise.”
(C) is correct.
(D) is fairly close to the text, but doesn’t repeat it exactly. The text says that people who knew “the real man” were “appalled to discover” how he was, and that seems pretty close to the answer choice’s ideas of knowing him “personally” and not being able to “respect him.” The problem here is the phrase “as an artist,” which isn’t reflected in the text. It might feel like a natural assumption to think that being appalled by someone in person would cause you to lose respect for the person as an artist, but we have to remember that the College Board is extremely nit-picky about these kinds of things. We can’t make assumptions when we’re looking for the answers; if it doesn’t specifically mention how people felt about Balzac as an artist, then we can’t choose (D).
(E) is probably the sneakiest choice of all. The text definitely says that people were “appalled to discover” how Balzac was, and this choice says that people expected Balzac to be a certain way. The main problem here is the word “unreasonable”—the text never indicates whether readers were reasonable when they expected Balzac to live up to the expectations they formed from reading his work. Remember that a difference of even one word from the text is enough to make an answer choice wrong.
Page 579, Question 15
This is yet another example of a question that is extremely, extremely nit-picky. Almost everyone who misses this question chooses (D), because the text says in line 41 that “only the male’s initials” were eventually on the token. But here’s the problem: the question asks about “the seventeenth century,” but line 41 is talking about “the late eighteenth century.” So (D) is restating an idea from the passage that applies to a timeframe different from the one the question asked about. The correct answer is (E), because the text says that “in the . . . seventeenth century, . . . tokens . . . carried the initials of the man’s and woman’s first names and the couple’s surname.” Later, it describes a seventeenth-century woman who “confidently joined in the family . . . business.”
As always, it’s critical to pay attention to every detail in every answer choice.
Page 580, Question 23
So-called “tone” questions like this are typically answered by finding a phrase in the text that reflects the definition of the correct answer choice. For instance, if (A) were the correct answer here, we’d have to see phrases in the passages like “those wonderful years of the past that will never return,” because that would be an example of “affectionate nostalgia.”
Here, we have a special case: neither text uses any kind of language that betrays any particular tone, so the answer is (B), because being “analytical” and “detached” essentially means that you write with no emotion at all.
Some people see words like “agitating” in line 91 and assume that the correct answer is either (C), which mentions “regret,” or (D), which mentions “indignation.” But there are several problems with this type of thinking, from an SAT standpoint. First of all, and perhaps most importantly, “agitating” for something is not precisely the same thing as feeling “regret” or “indignation.” It’s true that agitation, regret, and indignation are all negative emotions, but they’re not the same as one another. Further, if we read line 91 carefully, we see that the author is not the one doing the agitating; instead, the author is referring to another person’s agitation. The text itself can still maintain an analytical tone even though it’s referring to someone else being agitated.