Page 588, Question 9
Students often miss this question because they don’t know all the meanings of the word “authority.” Most people think that the word refers to someone with some kind of official power over others, like a police officer; they might also think it refers to a recognized expert in a field. But the word “authority” can be used in general to refer to anyone who is the source of a quote, idea, influence, et cetera. So (E) basically says “quotes someone.” That’s why it’s correct: the author of passage 1 quotes someone directly, while the author of passage 2 does not.
Page 589, Question 10
This question is a great example of how we sometimes have to trace concepts back through the text in order to figure out which answer choice is restating it accurately.
Almost everyone chooses (D) because the word “humorous” seems to fit nicely with “funny,” “good joke,” and “laughed” from the text. But the text also includes the idea of “mak[ing] matters worse,” which seems a little odd if (D) is going to be correct, and might make us read a bit more carefully. Remember that the question is asking how Waverly felt about the advertisement, but the words “funny,” “joke,” and “laughed” are describing how the company at the table reacted to Waverly herself, which is a different thing. Furthermore, even if we accidentally like “humorous,” we have a problem because the word “effective” isn’t reflected anywhere in the text at all.
The correct answer is (A), because of the phrase “not sophisticated” in line 8. But, if you read carefully (and you should be reading carefully!), you’ll notice that the question asks how Waverly characterizes the advertisement, but line 8 is a quote from June’s mother. Why is that suddenly okay?
It’s okay because the quote from June’s mother comes directly after Waverly’s quote, and it begins with the word “true,” which indicates that June’s mother is agreeing with whatever Waverly just said. So Waverly says what she says, and then the mom says, “true . . . June is not sophisticated.” According to the rules of SAT Reading that we’ve discussed in this book, this means we can equate Waverly’s remark with the idea that June is “not sophisticated.”
That’s why “unsophisticated and heavy-handed” is correct. “Unsophisticated” is a pretty clear restatement of “not sophisticated,” and “heavy-handed” is basically a synonym for “unsophisticated” or for the idea of lacking “style.”
Page 592, Question 20
This question is challenging for a variety of reasons. For one thing, it’s one of those questions that ask us to think about an author’s argument, which means the correct answer might technically involve concepts not explicitly stated in the text (for a refresher on those questions, see the article called “Special Cases: Parallelism And Demonstration” earlier in this book). For another thing, the question is basically a double-reversal, because it asks for the answer choice that “detracts least,” which can be confusing for a lot of people.
But, as with any confusing SAT question, the key thing here is to remain calm, read very carefully, and pick our way through each phrase as we come to it.
Since the question asks for the choice that would detract the least from the argument, we should expect to find four wrong answers that all detract from the argument in some way, and one correct answer that does not detract at all. (Don’t be put off by the word “least.” Remember that the College Board deliberately attempts to mislead students by using these kinds of relative terms, but the SAT only has value if each question has exactly one correct answer, and the only way to achieve that is to avoid interpretation and deal in absolutes.)
Now we have to figure out what the argument is that the author is making in the cited lines. In those lines, the author makes a few related points. He says we have a “human need to wake by day and sleep by night.” He says, “night is when we dream, and . . . reality is warped.” He says, “we are accustomed to mastering our world by day,” but at night we are “vulnerable as prey,” so bats seem to “threaten” our “safety.”
Now let’s take a look at the answer choices. Remember, we’re looking for the one answer choice that does NOT detract from the argument in the text.
(A) does detract, because the argument says that people wake by day and sleep by night, but this choice says that many people do the opposite.
(B) also detracts, because the argument says that things that hunt at night scare us, but this choice says that some things that hunt at night don’t scare us.