Читать книгу SAT For Dummies - Woods Geraldine, Geraldine Woods, Ron Woldoff - Страница 28

As the SAT moves along its timeline closer to your door — or something like that — here’s the medium-term phase of your plan. Don’t worry if you didn’t start earlier. You have time, and these steps make a huge difference.

 Continue sharpening your reading skills. College-level reading skills matter in all the exam tests (Reading, Writing and Language, and Math). Continue reading college- and adult-level materials and searching up words that you don’t know. Peruse (read carefully) the daily newspaper, either online or in print, and check out the way that stories are told and statistics appear. Be sure to read the editorials and think about how the author argues a point.

 Work on your writing. Send a story in to the school newspaper or send letters or emails to a publication editor. Writing for an audience ups your writing game, because you pay much closer attention to your reasoning and grammar. Do this a few times, and you’re a pro! This is especially true with the sort of writing that makes a case for a particular point of view, because that’s what you have to read, analyze, and possibly write on the SAT.

 Get a math study-buddy. Not a tutor. A tutor is good, but you can also benefit from studying with someone on your own level. You’ll get stuck on questions that your friend knows, while your friend will need help that you can provide. The studying process gets a little less tedious, and you’ll be glad to know that you’re not the only one in the room who doesn’t know all the answers.

 Revisit the practice exams in Part 5 of this book. Pay special attention to the questions that you missed before, or if this is your first round, mark those missed questions for review later on. Also check any question that puzzled you or took too much time, even if you guessed the right answer! After you know which sort of question is likely to stump you, read the chapters that explain how to answer those questions.

 Revisit your PSAT/NMSQT. Just as with the practice exams, you need to revisit your performance on an SAT-style exam, but the PSAT is more relevant because it shows you how you do in an actual exam setting. Plus, you need to make sure that you can handle the topics that you missed on that exam, such as reading passage main idea, verb parallelism, or coordinate geometry.

Keep following this plan, and you’ll be in fine shape for the SAT. Now to shift your process for the final stretch.