Today, I’m going to share some of my tips for how to get a 750+ on the reading section. This is my bread and butter. That’s the number one kind of category of score that I get, which is people who are trying to get that elusive 1550+ score.
Simply The Passage
Tip number one is to simplify the passage and any information for that matter. Whenever I am approaching the SAT, one of the things that we’re dealing with is too much information. You’ve got all of these questions. You’ve got an entire passage. You’ve got a question and the question stem. You’ve got a little blurb at the top of the passage. There’s so much information all over the place, and your job is to try to make questions and passages simpler and easier to deal with. My goal is always to distill information down so that I am juggling as little information as possible. I’m always trying to boil everything down to get to what matters most. So, I’m going to show you how I do that on one question. My whole goal here is to really reduce my mental load. And this is a question about black beans. I feel like it was one of the first practice questions that the CollegeBoard released when they announced the digital SAT. I pulled all of the examples, by the way, from the College Board question bag. If you haven’t checked that out, it’s one of the best resources to prepare for the SAT, and it’s totally free from the CollegeBoard.
Black beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) are a nutritionally dense food, but they are difficult to digest in part because of their high levels of soluble fiber and compounds like raffinose. They also contain antinutrients like tannins and trypsin inhibitors, which interfere with the body’s ability to extract nutrients from foods. In a research article, Marisela Granito and Glenda Alvarez from Simón Bolivar University in Venezuela claim that inducing fermentation of black beans using lactic acid bacteria improves the digestibility of the beans and makes them more nutritious.
Which finding from Granito and Álvarez’s research, if true, would most directly support their claim?
A) When cooked, fermented beans contained significantly more trypsin inhibitors and tannins but significantly less soluble fiber and raffinose than nonfermented beans.
B) Fermented beans contained significantly less soluble fiber and raffinose than nonfermented beans, and when cooked, the fermented beans also displayed a significant reduction in trypsin inhibitors and tannins.
C) When the fermented beans were analyzed, they were found to contain two microorganisms, Lactobacillus casei and Lactobacillus plantarum, that are theorized to increase the amount of nitrogen absorbed by the gut after eating beans.
D) Both fermented and nonfermented black beans contained significantly fewer trypsin inhibitors and tannins after being cooked at high pressure.
With this question, I kind of go through and take notes as I’m reading. I have a “because” in the first sentence, which shows cause and effect. Then we have “difficult to digest because of soluble fiber and raffinose.” Basically, I just want to digest this passage down, no pun intended, to the things that are most important. I’m also going to list what’s bad because there are a lot of technical things here, and I’m not going to memorize all of them. As we keep going and condensing the information, we see that fermentation makes black beans more digestible. I’m going to anticipate my answer here before I look at the answer choices: that means I need to get rid of my fiber and raffinose, which leads to more nutrition. If it’s more nutritious, I probably have less of the bad and more of the good. So, I already have my stuff mapped out because I’ve reduced and boiled down my information to all of these keywords and what’s going on.
And it can seem like this process might be time-consuming. And I agree that the way that I’m doing it right here might be a little bit time-consuming. Sometimes I do this reduction on paper, particularly for command of evidence. I usually do chicken-scratch notes. And sometimes I abbreviate big time. Like I might do SF for soluble fiber or RF for raffinose or something like that. I’m doing it a little bit more spelled out here. And sometimes I internalize this, or I subvocalize it. So, there’s a range between how much you take notes or highlight versus how much you just keep in your head. But the process is the same, which is the idea that I’m trying to narrow all of the information that I’m dealing with.
Moving onto the question: I know I want to support the scientists’ claim. And their claim is that we ferment things, and then we have more digestible beans. Choice A makes no sense because it’s saying fermented beans have more trypsin and tannins, which are the bad stuff. That makes no sense. That can’t make it less bad and more good. Definitely wrong. Choice B says that fermented beans contain significantly less soluble fiber and raffinose, which aligns since it was difficult to digest because of these. I am really liking B. Choice C mentions nitrogen, and I don’t know if nitrogen is good or bad. It’s not on my list and is out of scope. And when I find things that are out of scope, they’re dangerous. They could be wrong. On an inference question, maybe they were right if there’s nothing else that works. But I really want to be careful about specifics that aren’t mentioned in the passage anywhere. They could be really dangerous. And I have no idea what the impact of nitrogen is and whether it has anything to do with making things more nutritious. I don’t have enough information to know the connection between nitrogen and that idea. So this one is dodgy because it’s got that weird specific that I don’t have any evidence for. The problem with Choice D is that it mentions both fermented and non-fermented, but I don’t want non-fermented black beans to also have good things going on. And so, B is on target. You see, when I reduce things down, when I boil it down, and I see exactly what my scope is, I’m going to pick an answer choice in that scope and find the answer. And part of the idea is that these are short enough that you can kind of process the whole thing sometimes. And you don’t always have to read the whole thing, but on these command of evidence questions, this is one technique that I’m using. In any case, I’m always trying to narrow down what it is that I need.
Flags
Okay, we’re going to go on to tip two, which is what I call flags. I’m going to teach you one kind of flag. I’m not going to get to all my flags because that would take a half hour. Flags are words that the CollegeBoard uses in SAT questions to make answer choices dodgy or wrong. And there are particular categories of words that tend to be the go-tos for CollegeBoard question writers. And the first flag that I’m going to talk about today (or the only flag because we don’t have time for all of them) is comparisons. We’re going to look out for comparisons in the answer choices because they are dangerous.
Scientists studying Mars long thought the history of its crust was relatively simple. One reason for this is that geologic and climate data collected by a spacecraft showed that the crust was largely composed of basalt, likely as a result of intense volcanic activity that brought about a magma ocean, which then cooled to form the planet’s surface. A study led by Valerie Payré focused on additional information—further analysis of data collected by the spacecraft and infrared wavelengths detected from Mars’s surface—that revealed the presence of surprisingly high concentrations of silica in certain regions on Mars. Since a planetary surface that formed in a mostly basaltic environment would be unlikely to contain large amounts of silica, Payré concluded that
Which choice most logically completes the text?
A) the information about silica concentrations collected by the spacecraft is likely more reliable than the silica information gleaned from infrared wavelengths detected from Mars’s surface.
B) high silica concentrations on Mars likely formed from a different process than that which formed the crusts of other planets.
C) having a clearer understanding of the composition of Mars’s crust and the processes by which it formed will provide more insight into how Earth’s crust formed.
D) Mars’s crust likely formed as a result of other major geological events in addition to the cooling of a magma ocean.
Going through the passage, we see that we thought the history was simple, right? The history of the crust is simple because the crust is basalt. As I go through the text, I’m anticipating what comes next. These are inference questions, so I’m always trying to come up with my perfect answer right here before I look down. And so that’s what I’m going to do right away. So I’m going to say she concluded that if this was simple, then it’s more complex. So I’m using my keyword up there, that there’s a more complex explanation and that it wasn’t mostly basaltic. It was partially basaltic because this is saying that it was simple. This was it, but we have this additional information. So there’s more going on. Again, I’m rolling off this keyword in my introductory sentence. Introductory sentences are great because they can have wonderful keywords. And all of this distilling is like what I showed you in my first tip.
What Choice A is saying is that one kind of data is better than another kind of data. There is no indication that she’s digging into anybody’s methodology or the accuracy of data. This is totally off topic. And the other thing that I have here is a comparison, and comparisons are dodgy on the SAT. They must be explicitly stated. And if anything is not explicit and it is a comparison, you can’t infer it. You cannot infer a comparison. And I can’t talk about reliability. That’s not even in scope. And because it’s a comparison, I can confidently get rid of A. For Choice B, where in the world did other planets come from? This is a comparison, right? We’re comparing the idea of Mars to other planets. Guess what’s never mentioned? Other planets, so it’s out of scope. It’s a comparison that’s just nowhere to be found here. And it’s wrong also because I know comparisons are dodgy and they must be explicit. With Choice C, why in the world are we talking about Earth? This is out of scope. Is this a comparison? Maybe kind of, but it’s certainly an out-of-scope detail that’s super random. And I don’t know where it came from. So, Choice D is the closest to perfect. But you can see how when I know that comparisons are dodgy, it helps me eliminate other answer choices really quickly that I might have spent more time on. And as soon as I know that that comparison is not on the page, it’s nowhere to be found.
Focus on Keywords
My third tip is to focus on keywords. So, you saw when I was distilling information, I was finding keywords. Even when I did that last question, I was highlighting the words that matter. Finding the words that matter is so important. We’re going to talk about it in words and contexts now because keywords can operate in different ways, right? Keywords can even mean a lot of different things, and that’s fine. Keywords can be words that matter most when I’m reducing the passage, but they can also be words that inform where the blank is. So when I do these words and context questions, I have a blank, and I want to look at all the words that are sort of resonant with the opposite of that. They have a relationship with it. They can also be what I call signal words, words like conjunctions. Also words that define what I need. So when I’m in rhetorical strategy questions, for example, and I have a question stem and it says, “Which of the following uses information from the text to underscore a recent development?” those are keywords in my question of what I’m looking for.
Some scientists have suggested that mammals in the Mesozoic era were not a very ____ group, but paleontologist Zhe-Xi Luo’s research suggests that early mammals living in the shadow of dinosaurs weren’t all ground-dwelling insectivores. Fossils of various plant-eating mammals have been found in China, including species like Vilevolodon diplomylos, which Luo says could glide like a flying squirrel.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
A) predatory
B) obscure
C) diverse
D) localized
So it’s a little bit confusing because we’ve got some negatives and things like that, but remember to look at the keywords. They’ve said “not very,” but then they say “they weren’t all” this. So, this blank could be that they’re not a very “varied” group, because they have “various.” And I’m working off the various, and this is my keyword. They’re not a very varied group, even though this guy found that they had various plant-eating mammals. It says they weren’t all ground-dwelling insectivores. So this is saying they were all the same thing, but he’s saying no, they weren’t all this. We originally believed that they were all ground-dwelling insectivores, which means they were not a very varied group. I’ve got to figure out how all these double negatives are interacting. We have a but; they were not all like this. So, I know that I’m looking for “varied.” We have predatory—no—or obscure, which is also a no. Then, we have diverse—yes, that’s my varied—or localized, which is just kind of weird. You can see how fast I can get the answer choice if I map it out of here. So again, the idea is to find your keywords. When you have double negatives, you can box out the whole thing and then kind of figure out what the relationship is between the whole box here. When you have double negatives, be careful and kind of chart it out and find the easiest thing to work that blank off of.
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