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The SAT Prep Black Book(5)

By:Mike Barrett






I know you say that the answer to each question is always spelled out on the page, but I found a question where that’s not the case. Now what?


I completely understand that there are some questions where the answer doesn’t seem to be on the page somewhere, but I promise you that the issue is always—always—some error on the part of the test-taker, not on the part of the test. (This assumes that you’re working with a real SAT question published by the College Board, of course. Fake questions from other companies don’t have to follow any rules, and the strategies in this book—the strategies for the real SAT—do not typically apply to fake questions written by companies like Kaplan, Princeton Review, McGraw-Hill, and so on. That’s why it’s so important to have a copy of the Blue Book.)

So if you think you’ve found a real SAT question that doesn’t follow the rules, you need to try to figure out where you’ve gone wrong. It may be that you haven’t read some critical part of the text, or that you misread it, or that you misread an answer choice. It may be that some of the words on the page don’t actually mean what you think they mean. It may be a combination of all of the above, or even something else. But, somewhere in there, you’ve made a mistake.

I know it can be frustrating to hunt back through the question and the text to find your mistake, but I strongly advise you to do it, especially if your goal is to score really high. The process of figuring out your mistake will help you understand the test much better and greatly improve your future performance. (For more on these ideas, see the chapters called “How To Train For The SAT—Mastering The Ideas In This Book,” “The Nature Of Elite Scores,” and “The Importance Of Details: Avoiding ‘Careless Errors’.”)





I like my answer to a question better than the College Board’s answer. What should I do about that?


It’s normal to feel like the College Board has done a bad job of deciding the correct answer to one of its own questions. But we have to work very hard to overcome that feeling. We need to understand that the SAT isn’t really a test of reading ability; it’s a standardized test with questions and answers that can be reliably predicted because they follow certain rules and patterns.

So your job isn’t really to find the answer choice that seems most satisfactory to you. Your job is to ask yourself, “Which choice will the SAT reward, based on the rules it follows for these questions?”





What do I do for questions about tone and mood, or about the author’s attitude?


Questions about tone and mood should be treated just like any other Passage-Based Reading question, even though they might seem like they require us to interpret the text. For more on these questions, please see the part of this book called “What About ‘Tone, Mood, And Attitude’ Questions?”





Math Questions


Which math formulas are most important for the SAT?


If I had to pick, I would say that the formulas related to triangles, rectangles, and circles seem to me like they come up most often, in addition to the rules about complementary and supplementary angles, transversals, and so on.

But that answer is kind of misleading, for two reasons:

oAll the geometry formulas you’ll need for the SAT Math section are included in the beginning of each SAT Math section, so it’s not like you’ll need to memorize how to find the area of a circle or anything.

oIn general, the best approach to the SAT Math section is to resist the use of formulas wherever possible.

For more on the right way to approach SAT Math, please see the SAT Math section in this book.





Which type of calculator should I use?


In general, I would recommend that you use the calculator that makes you feel the most confident on test day. It’s also important to remember that there’s very little a calculator can do for you on the SAT, because the challenge with most SAT Math questions comes down to figuring out which basic math concepts are involved in the question, not doing some kind of complicated calculation. For more, see the section of this book that deals with SAT Math.





I found a question that requires trigonometry, and you said I would never need to use trig. What gives?


There are no questions on the SAT 1 that require the use of trig. If you think you’ve found a real SAT 1 question from the College Board that can only be solved by using the sine, cosine, or tangent functions from trig, then there is something in the question that you’ve overlooked or misunderstood. I would strongly advise you to keep analyzing the question until you can figure out a solution that wouldn’t require you to know trig, because the experience of figuring that out can be one of the most productive and effective ways to improve your understanding performance on the SAT. See the section of this Black Book called “The Importance Of Details: Avoiding ‘Careless Errors.’”