by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 27, 2011 | Blog, Reading (SAT & ACT), SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
One of the hardest things for many test-takers to adjust to on the SAT and ACT is the idea that English questions have answers that are both objectively correct and objectively incorrect. The truth, however, is that if you really want to improve your score, you need to approach each question with the attitude that there is only one answer. It might not be phrased in the way you would say it, or even be the answer that you would expect to see, but that doesn’t make it any less right.
Your English teacher might give you points for the creativity of your interpretations; ETS and the ACT will not. These tests are in no way, shape or form asking for your own personal interpretation or for speculation about what might be going on in a given passage; they are asking for what an author indicates is definitely going on in the passage. That means you need to base your answer exclusively on the exact wording that appears in the text and nothing else. If you have to twist the passage in any way to make the answer work, the answer is wrong.
In other words, match the question to the passage, not the passage to the question.
Let’s look at an example:
Newspaper editor and political commentator Henry Louis Mencken was a force of nature, brushing aside all objects animal and mineral in his headlong rush to the publicity that surely awaited him. He seized each day, shook it to within an inch of its life, and then gaily went on to the next. No matter where his writing appeared, it was quoted widely, his pungently outspoken opinions debated hotly. Nobody else could make so many people so angry, or make so many others laugh so hard.
9. In lines 4-5, the words “seized” and “shook” help establish which aspect of Mencken’s personality?
(A) His code of honor
(B) His sense of humor
(C) His vindictiveness
(D) His intensity
(E) His petulance
What words does the author use to describe Louis Mencken?
He was “a force of nature.” He “brushed aside objects…in his headlong rush.” He “seized each day and shook it…then went gaily onto the next.”
So Louis Mencken was like a whirlwind. He threw himself into things and did them as fully as possible. All this clearly points to (D) because someone who behaves like this is pretty intense.
If you were to read the question first and then just glance through the passage, however, you might just pick up on words/phrases like “brushed aside,” “seized,” and “hotly debated,” all of which are pretty negative, you might go for (C) or (E) instead. Now, Louis Mencken could have also been vindictive in his life. He could have also been petulant (irritable or ill-tempered).
But if you read carefully, this particular author is not actually saying either of those things about Mencken in this particular passage.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 24, 2011 | Blog, Grammar (SAT & ACT)
Sometime around second or third grade, most people learn that it’s not ok to start to start a sentence with the word “because.” While I have no desire to cast aspersion on your third-grade teacher, unfortunately that rule is only half true. The main reason is gets taught that way is that seven and eight year-olds have a tendency to write sentences like this:
Because I went to Disneyland last summer!
Or:
Because I played hockey with my brother last weekend.
As I hope you can recognize, neither of these is a full sentence; it is unacceptable to begin the sentences such as these with “because.”
Unfortunately, though, a lot of the time no one bothers to teach the other half of the rule three or four years down the line. The truth is that under certain circumstances it’s perfectly fine to start a sentence with “because.”
Here’s when: a clause beginning with “because” (e.g. “because I stayed out late last night) must be followed by a complete sentence.
Correct: Because I stayed out late last night, I fell asleep in math class this morning.
Since the second clause, “I fell asleep in math class this morning,” works as a stand-alone statement, it’s perfectly acceptable to start the entire sentence with “because.”
by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 23, 2011 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test)
One of the things I’ve noticed is that people hate to skip questions on the SAT. Even though they know that getting a question wrong will set them back an additional quarter of a point, they’d rather guess and risk lowering their score further than play it safe and move on. Skipping a question on the SAT is like admitting defeat: it means that you’re effectively giving up on the possibility of getting a perfect score, even if you’ve been consistently scoring in the mid 600s.
But guess what: while it does pretty much work that way for Math and Writing, on which even four missed questions can pretty much kill your chances of scoring in the 700s, Critical Reading has a much more generous curve. It is not necessary to answer every single question in order to obtain a high score. In fact, on some tests it’s actually possible to miss up to three questions and still get an 800. In contrast, four missed Writing questions along with an 8 essay will give you a score of about 670.
If you are actually trying to get an 800, I wouldn’t suggest that you skip Critical Reading questions (and if you are a serious contender for an 800, you really shouldn’t need to skip questions). But even if you’re just trying to break 700, you need to be open to the possibility of skipping a question or two if you really just have no idea about the answer.
To give you some cold, hard facts: In order to obtain a 700, it is usually necessary to obtain a raw score of about 57/67. Assuming that you skip 10 (!) questions and get all of the rest correct, that’s a 700 right there. Although I understand that skipping so many questions sounds far too risky to entertain, consider that choosing to skip 5 questions and then going for — and missing — another 5 that you’re not sure about will actually give you a score of 690. That’s a very important 10 points right there.
If you’re just trying to break 600, you have even more latitude. To hit 600, you only need a raw score of 45, or 2/3 of the questions right. Theoretically, if you skipped 22 questions and only answered the ones you were absolutely certain about, you could still pull a 600 (although I wouldn’t really advocate that you skip 22 questions).
A more likely scenario is that you skip 10 questions (which gets you to a raw score of 57), then miss another 8 for a raw score of 47 (8 x .25 = 2, and 49-2 = 47), for a scaled score of 610. If, on the other hand, you had tried to answer all 10 of the questions that you had skipped and gotten all of them wrong (statistically unlikely but possible if you really have no idea about them), that would give you a raw score of 42 and scaled 580.
So the bottom line is that sometimes you have be willing to give up the possibility of perfection in order to achieve something that’s merely very good. If you know that you always miss the last couple of vocab questions, plan to skip them; or, if you know that inference questions always trip you up, forget about them. It might just be enough to push your score to the next level.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 20, 2011 | Blog, Reading (SAT & ACT)
Remember the movie Awakenings? Actually, if you’re in high school now, you’re probably way too young to actually remember the movie, but you may have stumbled across it on late-night cable at some point: it’s the one with Robert DeNiro, about a guy who suddenly wakes up after being in a coma for decades… It got nominated for a couple of Academy Awards.
Anyway, if you’re wondering what on earth a movie released all the way back in 1990 could possibly have to do with standardized test-prep in 2011, the answer is: quite a bit. You see, Awakenings is based on a book of the same name, a book that was written by a man named Oliver Sacks. Sacks is a neurologist who happens to have a fascination with unusual illnesses involving the brain: people who have strokes and suddenly develop extraordinary musical abilities, or those who are unable to identify the faces of their loved ones, despite having perfect vision (an affiction from which Sacks himself suffers). He is also one of the authors whose works appear on both SAT Critical Reading and ACT Reading Comprehension.
I think that there are a couple of reasons why test-makers are so partial to Sacks’ work: its written in a style just accessible enough to be comprehensible to non-specialists but also just sophisticated enough to be challenging to many high school students. It deals with a subject matter that is culturally neutral but that at the same time presents a distinct point of view.
In short, it’s the College Board and the ACT’s dream come true. It’s also incredibly interesting reading, particulary when not condensed into 85 lines and accompanied by 10-12 questions. So if you’re looking to acquaint yourself with the kind of reading material that tends to show up on these tests, you can start by reading something by Oliver Sacks. Who knows? You might even like it.
Books by Oliver Sacks:
–Awakenings
–An Anthropologist on Mars
–The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
–The Island of the Colorblind
–Musicophilia
-Hallucinations
by Erica L. Meltzer | Apr 19, 2011 | ACT Reading
As I’ve discussed before, the point of skimming is not simply to read everything fast, but rather to read many things fast in order to identify the handful of places you need to slowly.
While this is generally true for the ACT, there are also some quirks particular to the Reading Comprehension section that make it necessary to approach skimming a bit differently.
1) Initial read-through
One of the particular challenges that ACT passages pose is that they can either focus primarily on a single argument and its supporting and/or contradicting evidence, or on a collection of facts and details that revolve around a particular topic. In the case of the former, you need to focus on the key places in the argument, the places where supporting and/or contradicting information is introduced.
These key places may only occur every other paragraph or even every third paragraph, but if you focus on topic sentences and keep an eye out for transitions such as therefore and for example, and punctuation such as dashes and colons (which signal explanations) you should be able to pick them out pretty easily. In case of the latter (especially Prose Fiction), you do actually need to read everything quickly in order to get a general impression of what’s going on — there’s just no other way to do it. As you skim, however, circle major transitions, explanations, and words like important to help you when you:
2) Go back to the passage in order to answer specific questions
Since the ACT does not usually give line numbers, Reading Comprehension can feel like some sort of twisted scavenger hunt. The trick is to identify one or two key words in the question and look only for them. If a question asks about the architectural significance of Frank Gehry’s Stata Center, for (real) example, look only for the words Stata Center and ignore everything else. If you have no idea where those words could possibly be, don’t just start reading random bits of the passage — chances are you’ll just get lost and miss important information when it does appear. Instead, focus on reading topic sentences to figure out which paragraph is most likely to contain those words.
As your eye moves down the page, draw your index finger along with it
Establishing a physical connection with the passage helps to focus you and makes it easier to spot the words you’re looking for.
Then, when you’ve found them, read the full sentences in which they appear, thoroughly, from beginning to end, and without skipping over anything. If you have to, put your finger on the page in order to make sure that you don’t miss a single word. Pay particular attention to any major transitions you’ve circled in or near those sentences because there’s a good chance the necessary information will be located near them. If you can’t answer the question from the information in that sentence, read the sentence before AND the sentence after it. There’s a good chance you’ll find what you’re looking for.
