Hey guys!
If you’re new here, I’m Anna and I somehow scored a 1600 on my SAT a few months back.
I’m making this video series to just share all my tips with the world and help people out
In this video I’ll be covering the reading section, but I also have videos on the math,
writing, and essay sections.
So let’s just get into it.
The reading section was by far the most challenging section for me, and in all my practice tests
I don’t think I ever aced it, but I somehow got really lucky on test day.
I used to think it was so subjective and ridiculous, but that’s only partially true.
The thing is, college board has to make it standardized, so that someone who doesn’t
have any background knowledge on the passages can still get the right answer.
This means that everything you need will be in the passages--so don’t infer ANYTHING!
This can be really hard, and I’ll get into the specifics of how inferring things can
backfire, but that’s the biggest tip, so keep this in mind when you’re watching the
rest of this video and taking your own tests.
So for my main strategy, I usually started off skimming the questions before each passage
really quick, just to see if there were any summary questions or overarching themes I
need to be looking out for, and I went ahead and underlined all the vocab and sometimes
answered those before even reading the whole thing to boost my confidence a little bit.
Then, definitely don’t skip reading the little intro they give here...this can be
really important in providing context and usually with the science passages or the two
that debate each other it can even occasionally help you answer some of the summary questions
without even reading the passage.
For example, this question asks...what’s the purpose of this passage?
Looking at the title, why birds fly in a V formation, that’s like verbatim one of our
answer choices, so it’s very likely to be that one.
Obviously you still need to read it afterwards to confirm this, but it helps you get in the
right framework of what you’re supposed to be getting out of the passage, otherwise
if you’re like me, you’ll end up reading the whole thing but not absorbing any of it.
And, it’s a bonus if you recognize the author or authors and already know a bit about them.
Take the two debating passages, and I swear when I say half the time these are about women’s
suffrage I’m not even exaggerating...so we can see that these passages are pretty
old, and passage 1 was written by a man, and passage 2 was written by a woman...they also
give us a little tidbit about how this is going to probably be a debate on equality
for women here.
So, we can’t outright assume anything here because of this, but without reading the paragraphs
I at least expect passage 2 to vouch a little bit more for women’s equality than passage one.
This expectation along with reading some of the questions ahead of time makes it a bit
easier to slog through all the fancy old language and it saves time.
Now my vocabulary in the real world is not very great, despite my weird obsession with
reading the dictionary in 5th grade.
But, the good news is the SAT vocab is mostly limited to easier words put into harder contexts.
Start by underlining the vocab term that the question wants to replace.
Then read the sentence as it is, and maybe a few sentences before or after it for context
as well.
After you’ve come up with your own idea of what it’s supposed to mean, plug each
answer choice into the full sentence and read it in your head.
Most of the choices should feel kinda clumsy even without more context, even if they all
look similar on their own, so you can immediately cross those off.
Here’s an example: even though I honestly probably couldn’t give you a definition
of dominion out of context of this paragraph, I have a general idea of what it’s supposed
to mean here because of the surrounding sentence.
Mankind have outgrown this state, and all things now tend to substitute, as the general
principle of human relations, a just equality, instead of dominion of the strongest.
So mankind is substituting equality for this overwhelming power that the strongest had
before.
If we go to our answer choices and do a quick plug in...ownership of the strongest or territory
of the strongest sound like they’re controlling the strongest instead of having the strongest
doing the controlling, or that the strongest have some kind of physical land instead of
just the hypothetical power.
Omnipotence I know I’ve heard used in a more religious sense, and it might suggest
something too powerful than what’s here.
Supremacy of the strongest is the way to go...it sounds the least bad when it’s plugged in.
Occasionally if it’s a trickier vocab question you’ll have to have read the whole passage
and keep in mind exactly what each one is suggesting compared to what the paragraph
was suggesting before, because sometimes the correct answer is something that you would
never think the word would mean in an out of context situation.
Ok now here’s my favorite technique EVER--and yes I did steal this from prepscholar but
it’s really good ok...
I used to die a bit inside every time I saw the two part questions where you’d have
to provide evidence for your answer..but once I started doing this I would be so relieved
because it makes them even easier than the normal summary ones.
Here’s what you do..
Circle each of the quotes in the passage for each of the questions like this.
You can differentiate the quotes of different questions by drawing little symbols on the
ones that go together for the same question so you don’t get confused later.
This can be a cathartic process to do in the beginning before you read a passage, or you
can spend the time doing it whenever you need a little brain break.
Next read the question to the first part but not the answer choices.
Now read your circled sentences one after the other and notice which ones don’t seem
to answer that at all.
Make sure every part of the original question is addressed in whatever quote you choose.
Now, once you feel like you already know the correct answer from this, predict what the
answer to the first question will be.
If these match up, it’s a good chance you got both of them right.
Let’s walk through an example to see how this works.
This one asks what this dude’s attitude is towards “today’s digital technologies”.
So we’re looking for both some opinion FROM Katz, this dude, and it has to be about current
technology.
Now we look at each of the quotes.
This one is just describing how he’s done some research and stuff, and also talks about
19th century technology, so that’s a nope.
This says we’ll never run out of jobs even though it may take time to develop the expertise
for them as they change.
This is a little more on the mark, but it still doesn’t really state anything about
new technology directly, so it’s probably not that one.
Next, he says, people always come up with new things to do.
That also doesn’t address new technology when you look at it out of context...it’s
a bit too general.
In the last one, he says “if technology disrupts enough, who knows what will happen”.
This is the only one that directly answers the first question by mentioning today’s
technology in it.
Now, to double check, we make sure that one of the answer choices of the first question
goes along with this.
They say, he’s alarmed, unconcerned, uncertain, or optimistic, and we know he’s uncertain
from the quote we selected.
See how easy it could have been to fall into the trap of selecting the 19th century one
though since the quote also said that, even though it completely didn’t address the
question?
I love doing them this way, since it guarantees that you’re not assuming anything and makes
the first part so much easier than it normally is, and then you can also have that check
at the end since both the questions need to match.
Note that sometimes the test will bypass the first question completely and just combine
them into one where you pick the right quote..but this strategy works there too.
The last thing is a quick word bank of terms..you NEED know what all of these mean before you
go into the test.
You might laugh at me, but I kid you not, on the September SAT (the one I got the 1600
on), I spent like 10 minutes trying to remember if to underscore meant to emphasize something
or to undermine it, and a lot of eraser marks and stress later I got the right answer, kinda
just cuz I knew the format of the test so well, but imagine how tragic that would have
been if that was the one question I got wrong just because of my crappy vocabulary.
Ok so those are my main tricks, but now I wanna talk about the details of each section
and how to improve.
The first passage is gonna be some fictional, narrative-type passage, and that’s a really
fun way to start off if you like that kind of stuff.
I recommend, after doing the skim through of the questions and underlining the vocab
and quotes, that you try to absorb yourself in the story as much as possible, try to get
invested in the characters with the short little glimpse you get of them.
Besides the vocab and the two part questions which we already talked about, these will
ask you stuff like plot points, why a character acted the way they did, why the author did
certain things or included certain devices, or just about general summary and themes.
This may seem subjective, but remember that all the answers have to be stated in the text
since this is a standardized test.
If your school offers an AP Lang or AP Lit class, I recommend taking that since it’ll
decrease the amount of time it takes you to comprehend these.
Alternatively, just have fun reading content that challenges you.
In the months before taking the SAT, I struggled through To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
in my Lit class and The Odyssey in my Humanities class, and my brain hurt every second I was
reading those, but those struggles made going back to the SAT section seem like child’s
play.
There will also definitely be a pair of passages, usually with opposing viewpoints about some
science topic, or two old dudes talking about the constitution or something.
For these I recommend skimming the questions first, like always, and then looking for all
the passage 1 specific questions and giving those extra consideration before you read
passage 1.
Then stop after you read the first passage and answer those all first while it’s still
fresh in your mind, then repeat with the second passage and the questions specific to that
passage.
After you read both and have gotten the themes of each one confirmed in your mind by having
to answer questions specific to both of them, then you finally do the questions that reference
both of them--they’ll usually ask things like...hypoTheTicalLy, if this person heard
what this person had to say, what would THEY say about that, or like, where is the common
ground here between these people.
Oh--or also it’ll just ask the relationship between the two passages and more often than
not they’ll have some sort of opposing viewpoint or they’ll call something the other mentions
into question, which is why I like calling it the debate section.
Ok so the rest of the passages are split between history, social science, and science.
Honestly I think the history ones are pretty generic and don’t have much specific advice
for them, except that they’ll probably be a bit harder to get through because of the
absolutely ancient sounding language, which again, reading more difficult books can help you with.
Social science ones focus on things like economics and psychology, and those are pretty fun since there’s
usually not too much jargon.
They’ll also have some nice graphs included with them, and those questions usually require
you to have both an understanding of what the theme is of the passage and then connect
it to the graph somehow.
Be careful and double check your work when it comes to these graphs, because misreading
what a question is asking for or not reading the right bar on the graph or something would
be a really sad way to lose points.
To get better at analyzing graphs, taking AP science classes can help, or just working
with Khan Academy honestly.
Now, I love science but I found myself struggling with the science passages because I was applying
my own background information to the passage and trying to answer the questions that way.
I’m gonna say it again cuz it’s important...don’t infer anythingggg.
It’s actually really challenging to prevent yourself from doing this a lot of the time,
but it pays off.
Always read all the answer choices before you select one, that goes for everything,
but it’s especially important here.
And the same thing with the graphs applies to this section too.
The last tip is a general one, but wait until the end to bubble all of your answers in,
because otherwise you’re not gonna be able to get absorbed in the passages by switching
back and forth.
You do have to make sure you have enough time at the end to do this, so maybe leave yourself
5 minutes no matter where you are in the section to just go bubble as fast
as you can, and then come back to the ones you’re still struggling with.
Wow ok...I think that’s all the main tips I have for this section...let me know if you
have any other questions in the comments below, and please post any of your own tips to help
everyone out too.
I hope this helped, and I’ll see you soon--bye!