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

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    Special Cases: Parallelism And Demonstration
    As I’ve explained, the College Board had to lay down some ground rules when it created the Passage-Based Reading questions in order to make them work as valid multiple-choice questions that could be administered on a large scale. One of those ground rules was the Big Secret of Passage-Based Reading that we’ve been discussing for several pages now: the idea that the correct answer to a Passage-Based Reading question will be the only answer that says the same thing as the relevant part of the text.
    Two other ground rules are a bit more obscure, and the College Board only uses them a few times on an average test. The first of these rules has to do with something I call “parallelism,” and it says that two ideas stated in succession can be treated as exact synonyms if a question asks about them, even though they aren’t synonyms in real life. If two ideas are stated in quick succession and they have some kind of negating phrase between them, then we should treat those two ideas as exact antonyms for the purpose of the SAT, even though they wouldn’t have to be antonyms in real life.
    This particular idea is too bizarre for me to feel comfortable making up a fake example, so in this case I’ll use an example from the College Board’s Official SAT Study Guide. The example is on page 392, starting at the middle of line 41, where the sentence reads, “Shadowy imaginings do not usually hold up in the light of real experience.” In that sentence, using the College Board’s way of looking at these things, we should know that the phrase “shadowy imaginings” can be thought of as the antonym of the phrase “real experience,” even though “shadowy” isn’t an exact antonym of “real” and “imaginings” isn’t an exact antonym of “experience” in everyday speech. When question 13 on that page asks about the phrase “shadowy imaginings,” we’re supposed to realize that it means something opposite to “real experience,” and choose “unsubstantiated” (because “un” is a negating prefix and “substantiated” can mean “real”).
    If you think that sounds like a little technical and complicated, you’re right, it does . But the questions involving this parallelism idea pretty much always end up being complicated like that—they’re often the hardest questions for students to answer. Luckily, there aren’t going to be that many of them on any one test.
    The other ground rule I’d like to talk about is the idea of demonstration. Sometimes—not often, but sometimes—the College Board expects you to identify a correct answer because it technically describes something that the text demonstrates, rather than restating it. One example appears on page 479 of the same book, in question 17. That question asks about lines 4 through 8 of the text, and the correct answer to the question mentions “vivid imagery.” This answer is correct because the citation includes this sentence: “Raindrops . . . bounced against sidewalks in glistening sparks, then disappeared like tiny ephemeral jewels.” This sentence is a demonstration of imagery, not a collection of words that mean the same thing as the word “imagery.” Again, the College Board rarely asks questions of this type, but it’s important to be aware that it may occasionally do so.

The Passage-Based Reading Process In Action Against Real Questions
    To prove that the SAT Passage-Based Reading process works against real SAT questions like the ones you’ll see on test day, and to help you learn how to use that process on your own, we’ll go through all the Passage-Based Reading questions for the first Critical Reading section of the first test in the second edition of the College Board’s Blue Book, The Official SAT Study Guide . You’ll need a copy of that book to follow along. (Really, you’ll need a copy anyway, since it’s the only printed source of real SAT test questions—all