Tag: SAT Critical Reading
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Speed Reading: How It Can Help You Ace SAT Critical Reading
The critical reading section of the SAT can be especially terrifying if you’re a slow reader. With so many passages to analyze and so many questions to answer, this section can quickly become overwhelming. But, despair not! For all you slow readers out there, there is alas a solution! No. No, it’s not pizza. Not…
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How to Study SAT Critical Reading
A Quick Anecdote First, I should mention that this story is a bit tweaked for dramatic effect (read: not completely true), but the main point of the story is untainted by the details I’m adding. A few years ago, I was working with class of around ten SAT students through a difficult reading comprehension passage…
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SAT Critical Reading – Vocabulary In Context
A very common question on the reading passages is the vocabulary-in-context question. Students also tend to make a very common error on these question types: matching up the answer choice with the words in quotation marks. Let me show you how this works. As it appears in the passage, the word “heralded” most nearly means…
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Common SAT Critical Reading Traps
The Traps 1. Extreme Language Often the SAT will make an answer that could debatably be correct by adding a word such as “never”, “always”, or simply, “no”. Remember, the correct answer has to be back up by the text in the answer. But an extreme answer is one that usually doesn’t have text to…
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Reading SAT Fiction Passages
On every SAT, there’s one long fiction passage. It’s usually the longest individual reading passage on the test (which means about 75-100 lines). You might get a shorter fiction passage at only 50 or 60 lines long, but that’s less common. The SAT likes relatively recent fiction, but it’s not unheard of to see something…
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Reading SAT Passages Faster
Note: This post has been updated to reflect changes in the SAT beginning March 2016 (aka the “New” SAT). Okay, so picture this: it’s Saturday morning and you’re taking the SAT. You’re working on the Reading test, and you’ve got about 5 minutes left in the section. You think you’re golden; you’re just about to…
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How to Take Notes on SAT Critical Reading Passages, Faster
One of the most important things you can do to raise your critical reading score on your SAT is to improve your reading strategy. There’re a few ways reading the passage often goes wrong—forgetting to look at the big picture, for one—and the best way to avoid all of them is to refine your notes.…
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How to Find the Main Ideas in SAT Reading Passages
SAT reading passages can be a little hard to pick apart. They’re not light reading, and you probably won’t have any real interest in the topic. And they’re full of detail, a lot of which ends up being pretty unnecessary for the questions. It’s true that there are lots of questions that ask about specific…
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“Primary Purpose” Questions in SAT Reading
Your SAT reading comp sections will include a few questions that look something like this: The primary purpose of this passage is to Or this: The authors overall tone could best be described as And in order pick the right answers for these big-picture questions, you need to zoom out. There are a lot of…
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SAT Critical Reading Mini Practice
How confident are you in your SAT critical reading skills? This passage may not be the most exciting thing to read, but that’ll be true on your SAT, too—that’s not the point! Your goal is to understand the structure, function, and implication of the information you’re given. Take some notes, and don’t forget to refer…