The SAT Prep Black Book(43)

By the way, while we’re on the subject of this question, let’s talk about the very fine difference between an “imaginary” “illusion” and something that is “implausible.” If something is “implausible,” it is difficult to imagine or believe. On the other hand, if something is “imaginary,” then it’s not real. It’s possible that something could be imaginary while still being quite plausible: a short story about a child who draws on the sidewalk with chalk could be a work of fiction (and therefore imaginary) while still being very believable (and therefore plausible).

In most classroom situations, if you referred to an illusion as something “implausible,” your teacher would probably have no problem with that; on the SAT, though, these kinds of subtle distinctions matter. The text describes things that didn’t happen; it doesn’t specifically describe the plot of any movie as “implausible.”





Page 725, Question 11


This question often looks challenging to test-takers, but, if we stay calm and consider each choice carefully, remembering that we want to find an answer choice that’s directly reflected in the text, we can work through it fairly easily.

(A) is wrong because the text doesn’t specifically say anything about the particular spots where things are found, and it doesn’t say anything about “social significance,” even though it mentions “social structures” in line 9.

(B) works because the text specifically says “much less is known” about a civilization “because linguists have yet to decipher the . . . script found on recovered objects.” In other words, it specifically says that the reason we don’t know as much about the Indus civilization is that we don’t understand its language, which means that understanding its language would help us know much more than we know right now. Note the similarities between “decipher” and “decode.” So (B) is correct.

(C) doesn’t work because the text doesn’t specifically mention any such similarities. It does talk about social structures, and it does talk about old cultures, but it doesn’t specifically say that structures of old cultures were all similar to one another.

(D) doesn’t work for a variety of reasons. For one thing, there is a difference between “learn[ing] the language” and “decipher[ing] the script” of a language—we could learn to decipher written texts without actually knowing how to speak the language of that text. Another problem is the word “effective”—nothing in the text gives any specific indication of what would constitute “effective” archaeology.

(E) doesn’t work because the text only mentions “Harappan script.” It doesn’t make any generalizations about other “ancient languages.”





Page 727, Question 19


This is one of those questions in which the College Board gives credit for an answer choice involving the idea of humor, but most test-takers don’t find anything humorous in the text.

(B) is correct because the phrase “wickedness incarnate” can’t be meant literally—remember that the College Board will be okay with us calling things humorous (or, in this, calling something a “parody”) when the text describes something that can’t be taken literally. “Incarnate” literally means “made into flesh” (note the similarities of the roots in “incarnate” and “carnivore.”) So the text would be saying that people on the Right think that “government regulations” are always “wickedness incarnate.” (You may want to read lines 82 - 84 carefully to see what I’m talking about. The text says that some people are afraid of good news because it would mean that regulations can sometimes be “something other than wickedness incarnate.” This means that their assumption is that all regulations are normally “wickedness incarnate.”) The idea of “people with certain political leanings” from the answer choice matches with the phrase “the Right” in line 82: people on “the Right” tend to be conservatives.

(C) also talks about “humor,” but the phrase “deep longing of the author” has no parallel in the text.





Page 763, Question 7


This is a question in which we’re asked to find an answer choice with a scenario that parallels a scenario in the text. Strictly speaking, these kinds of questions can involve finding answer choices with concepts that aren’t directly stated in the text, but the relationships among the concepts will still be exactly the same as what appears in the text.