(E) is another commonly chosen wrong answer. It doesn’t work because nothing in the text talks about a reader having difficulty expressing his own voice. The text talks about the fact that it’s sometimes hard for the reader to imagine the writer’s voice if the writer is of a different gender. Once more, we see how critical it is to read every detail of every answer choice, and to take nothing for granted!
Page 793, Question 11
Students often have a lot of questions about this passage. As always, those questions tend to arise from not reading carefully enough.
Here, we’re asked to find an answer choice that reflects Mulcahy’s mood or attitude at the time that he “smile[s]” in line 33. The rest of the sentence that mentions the smile says that Mulcahy feels “a kind of pity, mingled with contempt and dry amusement.” So we want an answer choice that reflects those emotions.
Many people like (A), but (A) has problems that keep it from being correct. The original text doesn’t say that Mulcahy feels pity for himself, but (A) mentions “self-pity.” The original text also doesn’t specifically say anything about being cynical or skeptical in those lines.
Some people also like (D), but the text doesn’t specifically talk about “disappointment,” even if it seems natural to assume that someone who has just been fired might be disappointed.
(E) ends up being correct because the phrase “condescending sympathy” goes with “a kind of pity,” while “amused scorn” in the answer choice goes with “amusement” and “contempt” in the text.
Page 827, Question 13
People often miss this question because they don’t stop to think about the specific meanings of the words “that” and “how,” and about the difference between those meanings.
In this context, the word “that” indicates the existence of a particular fact; when the author says “I can show that Fido is alert,” he means that he can demonstrate the truth of a particular fact, which is the fact that the dog is alert to something.
In this context, the word “how” indicates the specific way in which something is happening. When the author says he can’t show “how [Fido is alert],” he’s saying that he can’t demonstrate the specific way in which Fido is alert.
If we put these ideas together, we see that the author is saying he can show the truth of the alertness, but not the way the alertness works.
When we realize that “awareness” and “alertness” are synonyms in this context, and when we realize that the phrase “the nature of” goes with the idea of “how” something happens, we see that (D) restates what the author says, so it’s the correct answer.
People who get this wrong tend to choose all four of the wrong answers with more-or-less equal frequency, so let’s take a look at them.
(A) doesn’t work because the difference between “seeing” and “believing” is mentioned in lines 39 and 40, and it’s not mentioned in connection with the difference between “that” and “how” that we’re being asked about. This is a great example of how we have to read very carefully to make sure that we’re choosing an answer choice that combines the right ideas from the text.
(B) doesn’t work because the text doesn’t mention how the cat perceives things.
(C) doesn’t work because the text doesn’t mention anything to do with the difference between a hypothesis and a speculation.
(E) might seem attractive at first, because the text does mention “falsifyingly literal representations” in line 44. But there’s a problem here: the text doesn’t say anything to match with the phrase “accurate representations” in this answer choice.
Page 828, Question 16
This question is yet another good example of how we have to read very carefully when we work on the SAT. It’s also a good example of the way we have to be willing to treat consecutive statements as synonymous on the Passage-Based Reading questions. The first sentence of the essay talks about “two warring souls,” and then line 6 talks about “the tension between race pride and identification with the nation as a whole.” The idea of “tension” between two things in that second sentence goes with the idea of “warring” in the first sentence, so the two “souls” at “war” are “race pride” and “identification with the nation as a whole.”
That’s exactly what (C) refers to, which is why (C) is correct.
Again, it’s important to read everything carefully, and to force ourselves to find the answer in the text. A lot of people just talk themselves into (B), (D), or (E) because they don’t insist on finding an exact match in the text.