Using the introduction to get the big picture (cont’d from previous post)

A couple of days ago, I posted about how reading the blurb before the passage can in some cases allow you to quickly eliminate multiple answer choices to a question — even before you’ve read the passage(s). (If you haven’t read that post, you should consider doing so before you going any further).

To refresh you, this blurb establishes that the Cold War is the topic of this Passage 1/Passage 2 pair:

The term “Cold War” refers to a period of confrontation from about 1945 to 1990 between the two global superpowers of that era, the United States and the Soviet Union (a collection of republics led by Russia). These passages are adapted from a book published in 1998.

Because the topic must almost certainly appear in the correct answer choice to the question below, you can start by eliminating (C) – (E), even in the absence of any additional information.

Both passages are concerned chiefly with

(A) the causes of the Cold War
(B) the aftermath of the Cold War
(C) European political ideologies
(D) Soviet leaders and policies
(E) the devastation of World War II

Since (A) and (B) mention the Cold War, they can stay.

Now, however, I want to talk about how to go about choosing between those two answers by reading only the beginning of Passage 1.

The blurb states that the book was from 1998, which was 18 years after the end of the Cold War. So the book could talk about the aftermath of the Cold War (post 1990) as well as its origins (1940s), although it’s worth keeping in mind that the SAT usually doesn’t like to get into history that’s too recent — there’s just too much potential for controversy.

So now we need to develop a slightly more nuanced (more specific) understanding of the topic.

At this point, you might think, “I can’t possibly answer that question now. I need to read both passages. By the time I finish reading them, I should have a pretty good idea what they’re about. Then I can go back and answer it.”

You could of course save the question until the end, reading though both passages first, but that would leave you an awful lot of room for confusion. If you have a tendency to get caught up in the details, you could mistake “mentions” for “is about.”

This reasoning also overlooks one important fact. Critical Reading questions are listed in chronological order of the passages. If a question appears first, you can probably answer it by reading the beginning of the first passage. Yes, the first passage only, even though the question appears to ask about both passage.

Here’s why: the question is telling you that both passages have the same focus. By definition, then, the focus of the first passage must be the focus of the second passage. Therefore, all you need to determine is the focus of the first passage.

Here again, you might think, “Ok, now I have to read the whole first passage. By the time I’m done, I should have a pretty good idea of what it’s talking about.” In which case you might again be right, but you’re also likely to make things a lot harder than necessary.

Remember: the point of an introduction is to tell you what the passage is going to be about, i.e. the topic. In most cases, including this one, you can determine the topic of the first passage just by reading the first few sentences.

The traditionalist school of historians dominated the American scholarly discussion of the Cold War during the late 1940s and the 1950s. Traditionalist scholars generally supported the basic thrust of American policy toward Russia, which was known as containment. These scholars blamed the Cold War on Soviet expansionism in Europe, which they saw as motivated by either communist ideology, traditional Russian great-power foreign policy goals, or, most often, a combination of the two.

There are two major things to notice here: first, it talks about the 1940s and ’50s. This is when the Cold War began, not when it ended. Second, the statement that scholars blamed the Cold War on Soviet Expansion directly implies that he is talking about its causes. That in turn points to (A), which is in fact correct.

If you want to check it out, you can scan — not read — both passages for dates. It just so happens that the only dates that appear in the passage involve the 1940s and ’50s, effectively eliminating (B). The Cold War ended in 1990, and any discussion of its aftermath would include dates from 1990 and after.

This is, incidentally, where the knowledge component comes into play: much as contemporary educational theory might malign the importance of “mere facts,” they are really quite useful in a case like this. If you have no actual idea of when the Cold War began or ended, it probably won’t occur to you to use dates in this way. Sure they’re staring you in the face, but they won’t really mean anything to you. It’s the equivalent of staring at a math formula while simultaneously trying to figure out when and how to apply it. It’s profoundly irrelevant that the information is given to you if you don’t have the tools to use it. The same is true here: a person who knows the basic chronology of the Cold War can glance over the passages and instantaneously comprehend that they’re focusing on its origins.

It’s also not a bad idea to know when some of the most important events of the 20th century occurred — events whose repercussions continue to exert an enormous influence on events today.

It’s called, you know, like, being educated.

Why it is actually worth your time to read the blurb before the passage

If you’ve looked at any SAT prep books or taken a class, you’ve probably been advised to always read the blurb before the passage. As I was discussing with Debbie Stier yesterday, however, those couple of lines can seem like a throwaway. People keep on reading them because they know they should, but they don’t really know how to use the information they provide. Truth be told, I never thought all that hard about those little blurbs until recently, when I was explaining to someone to how incredibly important it is for students to be be able to identify passage topics. Forget main point, tone, and all those, uh, “higher order thinking skills” like inferences. If a student cannot figure out what the topic of a passage is… well, they’re not necessarily screwed, but let’s just say that things won’t be easy.

As I was saying this, I started thinking about the fact that students have difficulty identifying topics because they get so caught up in worrying about unfamiliar vocabulary and trying to puzzle out confusing syntax that they can’t figure out the basics. Then it occurred to me that there’s one place where the topic is likely to be stated clearly and with minimal room for misinterpretation: the italicized blurb.

Think of it this way:

The point of the italicized blurb is to tell you what the passage is about. In other words, it tells you the topic.

Many correct answers to Critical Reading questions mention the topic, either by name or rephrased in more general form.

In contrast, incorrect answers to Critical Reading questions are often wrong because they are off-topic.

In order to recognize when an answer is off-topic, you must know what the topic is. If you do not know what the topic is, you will not be able to recognize when answers are off-topic. That does not mean you sorta kinda have a general idea what the passage is talking about. It means you must be able to state the topic clearly, precisely, and accurately in no more than a couple of words. (I don’t take that last one as a given; I have had students who could state topics clearly and precisely, but also totally inaccurately.)

Since the italicized blurb often identifies the topic clearly and precisely in no more than a couple of words, it is therefore logical to read the blurb carefully.

To be sure, the blurb will not always provide this information, but it will do so often enough that it is worth spending a few seconds reading. This is especially true for Passage 1/Passage 2. The point of the blurb is to tell you what both passages are about — information that can allow you to answer seemingly complicated questions in no more than a few seconds.

Let’s look at an example:

Blurb:

The term “Cold War” refers to a period of confrontation from about 1945 to 1990 between the two global superpowers of that era, the United States and the Soviet Union (a collection of republics led by Russia). These passages are adapted from a book published in 1998.

What does the blurb tell us? That the passages will be about the Cold War, defined as the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union between 1945-1990. That is the topic.

The topic is not “the United States” or “the Soviet Union” or “Russia” or “global superpowers” or “the period between 1945-1990.” Those things are only mentioned in order to explain the topic. Any answer choice that implies that one of those things is the main focus of the passage will be incorrect.

Now consider this question:

Both passages are concerned chiefly with

(A) the causes of the Cold War
(B) the aftermath of the Cold War
(C) European political ideologies
(D) Soviet leaders and policies
(E) the devastation of World War II

This question is really asking us what the topic of both passages is. According to the blurb, the topic is the Cold War. Only (A) and (B) specifically mention the Cold War.

“European political ideologies,” “Soviet leaders and policies,” and “the devastation of World War II” make no mention of the Cold War, so (C), (D), and (E) can be eliminated for being off-topic.

So just by reading the blurb, you can eliminate three answers without even reading the passage.

But how to decide between the remaining two? Stay tuned…

Just what makes vocabulary “arcane?”

Here’s one to add to the “critical thinking” lack-of-definition phenomenon.

It probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone that I’ve been following the news of the SAT overhaul pretty closely; suffice it to say that I’ve read quite a few articles about it lately. In doing so, however, I’ve noticed a curious phenomenon: virtually every article I’ve encountered has included the line that the new SAT will eliminate “arcane” words. The authors of these articles almost invariably use the word “arcane.” I’ve seen one or two authors put it in quotes, implying an ironic or skeptical understanding of the term, but the use it with the literary equivalent of a straight face.

The SAT, of course, is distinctly partial to the word arcane, along with synonyms abstruse, archaic, esoteric and recondite. (Admittedly, recondite is a tad, uh, recondite, but I’d say the other two are pretty common.)

So the logical question: is the word “arcane” arcane?

The fact that journalists have no problem using the word arcane in mainstream publications would seem to imply that it is not actually arcane.

It is of course, hard to talk about a concept without referring to it directly, but think of it this way:

If you look at, say, The New York Times, you do not see sentences like this: Beginning in 2016, the SAT will no longer test really big and weird words that normal people don’t use.

Journalists do not write like that because that is not how educated adults write, and it is not what educated adults expect to read in publications intended for them. Educated adults expect to see words like arcane — common words that indicate a reasonable level of verbal acuity and sophistication.

An interesting question, though, is whether journalists have bothered to investigate which words are commonly tested on the SAT.That, however, would require them to have an interest in facts, and when it comes to discussions of the SAT in the mainstream media, facts are for all intents and purposes irrelevant. (If anyone bothered to look at a recent SAT, they would undoubtedly notice that passages are already drawn from history and the sciences. Or perhaps they’d just ignore that fact and focus on the sole fiction passage.)

Presumably, the journalists do not actually know that the word arcane is tested on the SAT, and that people consider it, well, arcane. If asked whether sixteen year-olds should know it, they would almost certainly answer in the affirmative.

The alternative would require quite a feat of doublethink — arguing that a word is irrelevant by using the word itself, apparently without noticing (or remarking on) the irony.

I recently reread 1984 for a book club I occasionally attend, and it’s hard not to see echoes of Newspeak in the idea that students’ vocabularies should be reduced to a narrow set of STEM career-friendly words. (Note: evidence presented in an “empirical” manner isn’t necessarily reliable; data can be distorted in all sorts of ways.) I don’t usually subscribe to conspiracy theory mentality, but it’s hard to not to see a parallel here. The fewer words you know, the smaller the number of texts you can access, and the smaller the range of ideas you can be exposed to in a meaningful way. (Studies have shown that readers must know at least 90% of the words in a text in order to understand it; anything less, and they can’t accurately infer the meanings of unfamiliar words or phrases).

Words are not merely collections of letters — they stand for concepts, some of which are quite challenging. My students already have a staggeringly difficult time with words like nuance — they are so accustomed to having things in presented in black-and-white terms that the very concept of discussing gray areas is foreign to them. Studying the kind of vocabulary tested on the SAT is not just about learning big words; it’s about gaining exposure to new ideas.

But back to the question at hand: what, exactly, makes a word arcane?

The fact that an average sixteen year-old does not use it on a daily basis?

The fact that a low-level STEM career isn’t likely to require it?

The fact that it includes more than three syllables?

Would anyone care to offer a suggestion?