The SAT Prep Black Book(47)

In the text, the clerk watches Akakyevitch getting teased, and the clerk himself feels “cut to the heart.” In other words, the clerk feels a deep emotion in response to watching Akakyevitch’s suffering. This is what “compassion” means by definition.

Most of the other answer choices don’t make any sense relative to the text—from a literary standpoint we might be able to explain a choice like “fear” by saying that the new clerk might have been afraid he would be harassed like Akakyevitch, but on the SAT that doesn’t work, since the passage never mentions the new clerk being nervous or worried about being targeted.

Some people also like the choice “confusion,” because the text says the clerk “thought . . . he heard other” “words.” But the rest of the text in that sentence doesn’t describe someone being confused or unsure of himself; it describes someone feeling an emotion in response to watching someone else be tormented. When the text says that the clerk thought he heard other words, then, it means that the clerk was so moved that he felt as though Akakyevitch were crying out “I am your brother.” This is the only way to read the text that makes the rest of the sentence have any coherent meaning.





Page 922, Question 14


The College Board often asks us about the function of quotation marks in a passage. If quotation marks are used in an SAT passage without the quote being attributed to a specific source, then they are being used to show that the author doesn’t completely agree with the way someone else would use a particular word. Think of these quotation marks like the “air-quotes” that people sometimes make with their fingers while they’re speaking, to show that they’re using a word or phrase in a way that they might not personally agree with.

In this case, the authors of both passages are showing that they don’t agree with the common uses of the words “frees,” “verbs,” “nouns,” “stealing,” or “property” in the contexts in which they are used in these passages. So the correct answer is (D).

Remember that when the SAT asks about the usage of quotation marks for unattributed quotes, the correct answer will involve the idea that the author does not agree with the common usages of the phrases in quotes.





Page 963, Question 16


A lot of test-takers miss this question because they make the mistake of trying to analyze the text. But if we adopt the more passive, reactive approach of simply checking through the answer choices to see which one is supported by the text, we’ll find the answer with much less difficulty.

(A) doesn’t work because no actual “event” is being “dramatized” here. In other words, the joke isn’t describing anything that actually happened—jokes, by their nature, are fictional.

(B) doesn’t work because there is no particular point being argued within or by the joke itself. The essay as a whole is arguing a point, as all essays do, but the joke isn’t arguing a point by itself. Since the question asked us about the role of the joke in the passage, and not about the role of the passage overall, (B) is wrong.

(C) is the correct answer because the text says, in line 33, that the joke “allows me to jump right into an idea . . .” The idea that the author can now “jump right into” after telling the joke is the “topic” being “introduc[ed]” in the answer choice.

(D) is wrong because the joke doesn’t involve defining any terms.

(E) is wrong because of the word “misleading,” among other things. It’s true that the end of the joke does involve the word “assume,” and it’s true that cows aren’t spherical, but the text itself never says that the assumption is “misleading.” This is yet another example of how careful we have to be not to impose our own interpretation on the text; in order for this answer choice to be correct, the text would have to say directly that the assumption was false or misleading. Since it doesn’t say that, (E) is wrong.





Page 976, Question 24


Of all the questions in the “Trabb’s boy” passage, this is the one that students ask about the most often. Many of them get caught up in the phrase “pervasive comic strategy” in the question prompt, because they don’t feel like they know what that phrase means. But we can actually work around that phrase by remembering that the correct answer must reflect something that appears directly in the text. So let’s go through the answer choices and see what we have:

(A) can’t work because the onlooking townspeople don’t say anything in the entire passage.