SAT For Dummies. Ron Woldoff

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ work the detail questions.These questions challenge you to remember certain details about the passage. Don’t worry about that. Instead, skim the passage for keywords from the question. For example, if the passage is about rearing dogs and the question is about leash training, skim the passage for the keywords “leash training,” and you’ll usually find that only a small part of the passage — like a paragraph — covers that. Then just read that paragraph and answer the question!

      5 End with the inference and main-idea questions.The main-idea question is easy to spot because it asks about the passage as a whole, and the inference question typically asks what could have happened or what’s implied. These demand a full understanding of the entire passage. Here’s the wisdom of this whole chapter summed up into one line. You ready? You get an understanding of the full passage by working the line-number and detail questions first.Now read the whole passage. It goes much faster and easier because you already understand parts of it.Of course, inference and main-idea questions may be early among the questions — but that’s okay: You skip them for now, go to the line-number and detail questions, and then come back to the main-idea questions. Answer the questions in the order that works for you.

If you want to try reading the whole passage before taking on the questions, get a timer and try this out on a practice test. If the passage doesn’t make sense to you, you run the risk of getting stuck trying to decipher it. At 65 minutes for the Reading Test, you have about 13 minutes for each passage and its questions. Reading one of these passages to fully understand it can take you upward of 10 minutes! Then you only have a few minutes left for the 10 or 11 questions that follow. Not only do you run out of time, you wear yourself out.

Getting Each Question Right, Quickly, With More Key Strategies

      It’s all about the strategies, right? With 65 minutes to answer 52 questions, you have slightly over a minute per question, and the topic is not always easy to understand. That’s okay. Use these proven question strategies combined with the preceding, tried-and-true time-management strategies to answer each question correctly:

      1 Cover the answer choices.Use your answer sheet to cover the answer choices. Don’t cheat. Even though the right answer is there, three other trap answers are also there. Dodge these traps and focus on the question.

      2 Answer the question yourself.Read the question, go to the relevant part of the passage (be it line number, keyword, or the whole thing for inference/main idea), and answer the question in your own words.

      3 Cross off the wrong answers.Your answer won’t match the right answer. That’s okay: It doesn’t have to. What will happen is that the other answer choices will be so far out in left field that they couldn’t possibly be correct. Here’s what you do:Move your answer sheet down just a little to expose Choice (A).Your answer sheet is covering the answers, remember? Now move it down a little to peek at the first answer. Based on your own answer, could this be right? The answer is hardly ever yes. More often it’s either not a chance or I’m not sure. If it’s not a chance, cross it off. If it’s I’m not sure, put a dot next to it. Don’t spend time on it. Either cross it off or dot it, and move on.Move your answer sheet down a little more to expose Choice (B).Here’s the thing. Sometimes an answer is so clearly, impossibly wrong that you can cross it off as soon as you read it. If you’re not sure, put a dot so you can go back to it. Either way, move quickly to cross off or dot each answer choice.Now check Choices (C) and (D).One at a time, either cross off or put a dot next to each answer. Typically, you’ll have three crossed off and one dotted, so go with the dot and get to the next question. If you have two answer choices dotted, check them to see which is more likely. If you can’t tell, that’s okay: take a guess, circle the question in the test booklet, and come back to it later with the remaining time.

       When does this strategy fail? When you go straight for the answer choices without thinking of your own answer first. What happens then is that you get caught in the trap of wrong answers, where you read each answer and think, “Maybe that’s it,” and spend all this time going back and forth to the passage. Don’t do that.

Also, don’t doubt your own answer when you read the answer choices. Sure, the correct answer knows the depth and detail better than you — but so do the three wrong answers! Trust yourself to answer the question well enough! No matter how far off your answer is, it’ll be close enough to cross off three wrong answers.

       No one gets a perfect score on the SAT Reading Test, so don’t kill yourself trying to. It’s okay to miss a question here and there — but it’s not okay to spend five minutes on one question.

Answering the Best-Evidence Questions

      Here’s one for you. You get a vague inference question. By following the preceding strategies, you answer the question yourself, and then you use your own answer to cross off the three way-wrong answer choices and go with the remaining fourth answer. You don’t really trust this fourth answer, but it has to be right, because the other three are so far off. And it is.

      Next question. “Which choice provides the best evidence for the answer to the previous question?” Wait, what? You’re supposed to be done with this! Nope. This question has a second part, where you select evidence from the passage. Each answer choice refers to a sentence in the passage, and you pick the sentence that supports your answer to the previous question. It looks like this:

       Which choice provides the best evidence for the answer to the previous question?

      (A) Lines 32–34 (“The student … whole Dummies book.”)

      (B) Lines 43–45 (“On exam day … amazingly well.”)

      (C) Lines 68–74 (“Several schools … scholarships.”)

      (D) Lines 79–82 (“There was enough … a Jeep.”)

      Each passage has two best-evidence questions, for a total of ten in the Reading Test. Don’t worry. There’s a strategy for these.

      1 Using the answer choices, mark those sentences in the passage.This is an about-face from the previous strategy of covering the answer choices, but for the second part of the two-part question, it’s okay. Go through the passage and mark the four sentences that the answer choices refer to. This way, you can find them easily while you’re focusing on the actual question. You don’t have to distract yourself by looking for that dang sentence. Since each passage has two best-evidence questions, you don’t want to get the sentences you marked for the first one mixed with the sentences you marked for the second one. Mark the sentences one way for the first round, say with [brackets], and another way for the second round, such as underline.

      2 Reread the correct answer to the previous question.With 52 Reading questions, your thoughts start to get slippery. Make sure you’re clear on which bit of inference that you’re looking to support.

      3 Cross off the wrong sentences.See? This strategy is similar. With that previous answer in mind, go to the passage and cross off the sentences that don’t support it. Again, you’ll have three that are way off and one that is so-so, and that’s what you go with.

СКАЧАТЬ