SAT Prep Black Book: The Most Effective SAT Strategies Ever Published (56 page)

Now that we’ve gone through a complete section of Improving Sentences questions, let’s take a look at a sample of some of the more challenging questions from the Blue Book, the College Board’s
Official SAT Study Guide
.

These questions are some of the ones that students have asked me about the most over the years. Of course, they still follow the same rules and patterns as other questions, but sometimes test-takers have a harder time identifying those things
in certain situations. So these questions aren’t really doing anything different from any other questions; it’s just that they’re sometimes a bit more subtle about what they’re doing.

As with other question explanations in this book, you’ll need a copy of the
Blue Book to follow along. Let’s get started.

I wanted to single out this question for consideration because it’s a good example of the way that questions can often be misinterpreted by test-takers as they prepare for the SAT.

Many people incorrectly assume that (E) is correct because it avoids the passive voice constructions that appear in (A), (B), and (C), but that isn’t actually the reason that (E) is correct. In other words, if we assume that passive voice is a problem on all SAT questions, then we’ll find ourselves getting questions wrong when the correct answer happens to use the passive voice.

It’s important to understand that the reason (E) is correct has nothing to do with the passive voice. (E) is correct simply because it is the shortest answer, and it has no grammatical mistakes.

Many test-takers end up making the Writing section much more difficult for themselves than it needs to be because they reach incorrect assumptions about the test’s reasoning on certain issues, and the passive voice is one of the best examples of this type of misunderstanding. If you want to do well on the SAT, it’s not enough to know about reading, grammar, and math in real life—you have to know the rules the College Board actually follows, many of which might seem odd or counterintuitive to most test-takers. That’s what this
Black Book is all about!

There are a lot of ways to approach this question, but the easiest one is probably to realize that (C) is the shortest answer choice and is also grammatically acceptable, so it must be right.

Just like on the previous question we talked about, many people will assume that the correct answer here is somehow related to the fact that many of the wrong answers use the passive voice. This is a tempting conclusion to reach, but it’s wrong—there are many correct answers in the College Board’s book that include the passive voice.

Remember: if the shortest answer choice has no grammatical issues, it’s right.

The College Board sometimes tests your awareness of idioms, and that’s what this question is doing. In fact, the issue is simply that “for all their talk” is a grammatically acceptable phrase in English.

(If “for all their talk” doesn’t make sense to you, think of it this way: the sentence is a bit like saying “even though they always talk about ecology, major companies have [blah, blah, blah].”)

The good news on this question is that an awareness of the three major patterns of Improving Sentences questions would have helped us answer this correctly, even if we didn’t know the idiom. (A) is the shortest choice, for one thing, which is often a good sign; it’s also one of the only two choices without any -ing or -ed words. It does have more short words than (C) and (D), but those two choices have weird conjunctions for this sentence—neither “besides” nor “in addition to” really makes a lot of sense in this context.

So it would be possible to work out that (A) is correct even without actually knowing the idiom being tested. It won’t always happen that knowing the patterns of the SAT can save us from not recognizing an idiom, but it will happen sometimes, clearly. I wanted to talk about this question so I could make it clear that we always have to be alert to the patterns in the answer choices, even when all hope might seem lost in the beginning.

This question is a good example of how important it is to read carefully and be very familiar with the test’s rules.

Many test-takers incorrectly choose (D), usually because the first part of the answer choice seems very clear and direct. But they overlook the fact that (D) ends with the word “and,” which isn’t an effective conjunction here—the SAT is picky about making sure that conjunctions are used appropriately.

People often
shy away from (A) and (B) because they start with the word “because,” but we have to remember that it’s actually okay to begin a sentence with the word “because” as long as the rest of the sentence includes a portion after the comma that could stand on its own as a sentence. In other words, any time that you could create a valid sentence with the structure “X, because Y,” then it’s also okay to write “because Y, X” as long as the X part could be a sentence on its own.

So if you could say “Measuring beforehand is good because the recipes don’t allow for interruption,” then you can also say “Because the recipes don’t allow for interruption, measuring beforehand is good.”
Note that everything after the comma could be set aside as a sentence on its own.

That means
(B) must be right, because it’s the only choice without any grammatical issues in the eyes of the College Board.

Note that (A) has the word “having,” which often indicates a wrong answer, and (C) has the phrase “being that,” which is also often found in incorrect answers. Further, (E) has many, many short words, which is also often a sign of an incorrect answer.

Again, it’s very, very important to read things carefully and to keep the design of the test in mind!

This question often confuses people who think it would be more natural to use the pronoun “their.” The problem with the word “their” is that it’s a plural pronoun, but the word “band” is singular in American English—even though the band involves multiple people, the band itself is a single thing according to the SAT’s grammar rules. So we have to use the word “its.” So (A) is correct.

Some people aren’t comfortable with the word “its” because they aren’t sure if it should be spelled with an apostrophe. But that isn’t anything we need to worry about on the SAT—the SAT doesn’t try to mislead you
by testing spelling. (The ACT, on the other hand,
does
try to mislead you with those kinds of issues, so if you’re going to take the ACT make sure you’re aware of that distinction.)

The College Board likes to insist on a kind of parallelism in these kinds of questions, so we have to make sure that we pick the exact right words to satisfy the SAT’s grammar rules.

In this case, the phrase “twice as many” is the first half of the structure “twice as many X as Y.” So we need an answer choice that begins with the word “as.”

That gets us down to (A) and (B). Now it’s time to complete the parallel structure: note that the original sentence says the birds “inhabit” something. That makes (B) correct.

Another way to approach this question would be to say that the College Board requires comparisons like “twice as many X as Y” to be made between similar things. Since the first half of the sentence is talking about the number of birds that inhabit an area, the second half of the sentence must also mention those words.

This is yet another example of a question that will needlessly confuse many test-takers who get intimidated by the number of words in each answer choice.

If we jump right to the shortest answer choice, which is (B), we see that it’s grammatically acceptable, which means it must be correct. (Remember, as I’ve mentioned repeatedly, that it’s okay for a sentence to begin with the word “because” if the words after the comma could stand on their own as a sentence.)

One other thing: it’s
not okay to say something like “because X is the reason why . . .” in the way that the original version of this sentence does. In those cases, you should just say, “X is the reason why,” or “because X,” as choice (B) does. (A), (C), and (E) all violate this principle in various ways.

This is another of the College Board’s comparison questions, so we should look very carefully to make sure that similar things are being compared in the correct answer.

The first half of the sentence talks about visiting places “in Great Britain,” so the second half needs to talk about things “in Canada”—this way, both phrases contain the word “in.”
So (E) is correct.

Remember that the answers will always be clear if we keep the test’s rules in mind and read carefully.

Test-takers are often surprised to find that (B) is grammatically correct, because the phrase “as does” strikes them as odd.

But we should remember that the College Board requires a certain kind of parallelism with the word “as” when we’re comparing two things, so the underlined portion will need to include that word (since the first half of the sentence uses it). That gets us down to (A) and (B). From there, we should recall that the test requires us to compare similar things—in this case, the campus “newspaper” must be compared to the hometown “newspaper,” not to the hometown itself. So (B) is correct.

There are a lot of subtle things that we need to make sure we catch in order to answer this question correctly.

One of the most often overlooked issues with this question is the fact that the first verb in the correct answer needs to agree with the word “reasons,” not with the word “process.” So the verb needs to be “are,” not “is.”

That means (A) and (D) are out.

From a grammatical standpoint, we could actually say that (C) is the only grammatically correct option, since the two “reasons” need to be noun phrases, and since putting the word “that” in front of a verb phrase makes it into a noun phrase. In other words, the phrases “that they have . . .” and “that they work . . .” actually function as nouns in (C).

Other people might try to appeal to a sense of parallelism to explain why (C) is correct, but I think it’s important to avoid appealing to parallelism whenever possible on the SAT—I try to limit its use in my explanations to questions that involve comparing two or more things. (The reason for this is that students can get kind of obsessed with the idea of parallelism and try to apply it everywhere, with disastrous results, if I’m not very careful about laying down strict rules.)

There are a lot of important things to note in this question.

One of the most important is that choice (A) is only wrong because the phrase “as well as” appears in a position where the word “and” could have been used, and the College Board doesn’t like that.

It’s also worth pointing out that (E) is the only choice without an “-ing” word, which is one of the ways we might realize it’s correct.

Finally, (E) begins with the word “because.”
Again, there’s nothing wrong with starting a sentence that way as long as the words after the comma could stand as a sentence on their own. (In this case, everything from the word “George” could stand as a sentence on its own.)

On this question, if we’re pretty good with grammar we can tell that (A) is the only grammatically acceptable choice, so it must be right.

But the phrase “which duration” will throw off a lot of people. In this case, though, it’s still possible to arrive at the right answer by following those three patterns I mentioned earlier. Let’s take a look at how things break down:

(A) has 2 words ending in “-ed” or “-ing,” and 6 short words.

(B) has 2 words ending in “-ed” or “-ing,” and 8 short words.

(C) has 2 words ending in “-ed” or “-ing,” and 10 short words.

(D) has 2 words ending in “-ed” or “-ing,” and 7 short words.

(E) has 3 words ending in “-ed” or “-ing,” and 6 short words. (It’s also the shortest choice, but it isn’t grammatically correct because of the word “making.”)

So we can see that (A) is the most ideal option, just by counting up the types of words the College Board likes to avoid and then picking the choice with the fewest of those words.

(This type of analysis will make a lot of English teachers very upset, but I don’t care. Because of the SAT’s poor design, these patterns can get you out of a lot of tough situations if you remember to use them. Of course, you have to read and count carefully to do it correctly.)

This is yet another question in which the shortest answer choice is grammatically acceptable, and is therefore the correct answer. So (E) is correct.

I’d also like to point out that the original version of the sentence might sound very natural to a lot of test-takers, but it’s no good from an SAT standpoint because it uses the word “it” to refer to the verb phrase “if you represented.” Remember that the College Board only lets us use the word “it” to refer to singular noun phrases.