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

text describes something that couldn’t literally happen.
    “Metaphor” is another word that the College Board uses differently from most modern speakers. On the SAT, when a question or answer choice refers to a metaphor, it’s referring to any non-literal use of a term. If a sentence in an SAT passage said, “she ran as fast as lightning,” then the correct answer might describe this as a metaphor , since a person cannot literally run as fast as lightning.
    When the College Board refers to something as “ironic,” we should understand that the text describes some kind of contradiction. If the text said, “John was working in a butcher’s shop even though he never ate meat,” a correct answer choice on the SAT might describe this as irony, because the ideas of a butcher shop and an aversion to meat are somewhat contradictory. This isn’t really a proper use of the term “irony” in real life, but if you keep this idea of contradiction in mind when encountering the word “irony” on the Passage-Based Reading questions, you should be fine.
    As long as you keep those specialized meanings in your head and apply them when the test mentions the concepts of humor , metaphor, or irony, you should still find that the correct answers to those questions match up with the relevant text.
    (By the way, if this all seems a little much right now, don’t worry—we’ll see plenty of examples of these ideas at work in real SAT questions from the College Board’s Blue Book in just a bit.)
What About Paired Passages?
    Sometimes the College Board asks you questions about two passages at once. These questions often ask how the author of one passage would respond to a statement from the other passage. When this happens, st udents often worry that they need to read an author’s mind, which seems very subjective and unfair.
    But we have to remember that every answer to a Passage-Based Reading question is spelled out somewhere in the text, and these questions are no exception, even if they seem to be asking you to guess how an author would feel.
    To answer these kinds of questions, we have to find a point in the text where the author we’re being asked about discusses something that appears in the other passage, and then choose an answer that reflects that author’s opinion on the subject.
    This might sound a little complicated, but it’s actually not that bad. Let’s use a fake example to demonstrate how it works for now, and then you can see some real examples a few pages from now when I go through some questions from the Blue Book.
    Imagine that a question asks how the author of passage 1 would respond to the views of the author of passage 2 on the subject of education. Let’s say that passage 2 contains this sentence: “Formal education is vastly overrated.” Finally, let’s imagine that passage 1 contains this sentence: “People who criticize formal education are usually the ones who need it most.”
    In this imaginary scenario, the correct answer might say that the author of passage 1 “believes that the author of Passage 2 would benefit from further education.” Two reasons combine to make this the right answer. First, this answer choice restates passage 1’s claim that people who criticize formal education are in need of formal education; second, passage 2 criticizes formal education when it says that formal education is overrated. In other words, the text of passage 2 shows that its author would be one of the very people that the author of passage 1 discusses in his own passage.
Conclusion
    So far, we’ve talked about the general processes for answering a wide range of Passage-Based Reading questions on the SAT. Adhering to the approach I’ve described here will get you through the vast majority of real test questions that you’ll ever see on the SAT.
    But there are a few question s that will involve one or two further considerations that you’ll also need to be aware of. Let’s talk about them in the next