SAT Prep Black Book: The Most Effective SAT Strategies Ever Published by Mike Barrett

answer choices very carefully, and we’re still going to be looking for the answer choice that echoes the text.
    For instance, imagine that the text says, “Steven was surprised to discover that Lauren had never learned to throw a baseball, since she was so athletic in general,” and the question asks us to pick the answer choice that describes a similar situation. The correct answer might say something like “a woman is stunned when she finds out that her friend, who is a great musician, has never learned to play the piano.” In this hypothetical scenario, both the text and the correct answer would describe someone being surprised to find out that another person has a lot of talent in a particular field but has never learned a particular skill within that field.
    Don’t worry too much about these types of questions. For one thing, reading closely and paying attention to relationships will make these questions pretty easy. For another thing, there aren’t many questions like this on any given test, anyway.
What About “Except” Questions?
    Some questions seem to take the normal question-answering process and turn it on its head, often by using the word “except.” Such a question might say something like “all of the following are found in Passage 1 EXCEPT . . .”.
    For a question like this, we’re still going to read the relevant portion of the text carefully, but now the correct answer is going to be the only choice that does NOT appear in the passage.
    It’s always important to make sure you read all five answer choices for every question (it helps you catch mistakes). But it’s ESPECIALLY important on these “except” questions because students often accidentally forget about the “except” and just choose the first choice that does appear in the text, and get the question wrong. If you accidentally overlook the word “except” but still read all five answer choices, you have a better chance of noticing your mistake.
What About “Vocabulary In Context” Questions?
    Some questions ask you how a word is used in the passage. They often read something like this: “In line 14, the word ‘sad’ most nearly means . . .”
    For these questions, just like for all the others, we’re ultimately looking for an answer choice that restates something from the passage—and not just one that restates the original word in the question, because usually all the choices will do that in one sense or another. Instead, we need a word that restates an idea from the surrounding text. In the imaginary question above, if the text said, “The dilapidated old warehouse was in a sad state by the time the inspector closed it for safety reasons,” then the correct answer would be something like “worn out,” because “worn out” means the same thing as “dilapidated” in this context. In this hypothetical scenario, a choice like “weepy” wouldn’t be supported by the text, even though it can be a synonym for the word “sad” in other situations.
What About Humor , Metaphor, And Irony?
    Sometime s an answer choice will mention the idea of humor, metaphor, or irony. In order to evaluate these kinds of answer choices along SAT lines, we have to know that the College Board uses these terms in very particular ways that don’t really reflect their use in everyday speech.
    Whe n the College Board refers to part of a passage as “humorous,” “comical,” “funny,” or anything else along those lines, we should understand that to mean that the text cannot be true in a literal sense. For instance, if the text says something like “when I found out we would have homework over the vacation I was the mayor of Angrytown,” then the College Board might refer to that remark as humorous, because the speaker wasn’t really made the mayor of a place called Angrytown just because he found out about a test. Whether a real person would actually laugh at something doesn’t matter on the SAT; all that matters is whether the