Читать книгу SAT For Dummies - Woods Geraldine, Geraldine Woods, Ron Woldoff - Страница 44

It’s all about the strategies, right? With 65 minutes to answer 52 questions, you have slightly over a minute per question, and the topic is not always easy to understand. That’s okay. Use these proven question strategies combined with the preceding, tried-and-true time-management strategies to answer each question correctly:

1 Cover the answer choices.Use your answer sheet to cover the answer choices. Don’t cheat. Even though the right answer is there, three other trap answers are also there. Dodge these traps and focus on the question.

2 Answer the question yourself.Read the question, go to the relevant part of the passage (be it line number, keyword, or the whole thing for inference/main idea), and answer the question in your own words.

3 Cross off the wrong answers.Your answer won’t match the right answer. That’s okay: It doesn’t have to. What will happen is that the other answer choices will be so far out in left field that they couldn’t possibly be correct. Here’s what you do:Move your answer sheet down just a little to expose Choice (A).Your answer sheet is covering the answers, remember? Now move it down a little to peek at the first answer. Based on your own answer, could this be right? The answer is hardly ever yes. More often it’s either not a chance or I’m not sure. If it’s not a chance, cross it off. If it’s I’m not sure, put a dot next to it. Don’t spend time on it. Either cross it off or dot it, and move on.Move your answer sheet down a little more to expose Choice (B).Here’s the thing. Sometimes an answer is so clearly, impossibly wrong that you can cross it off as soon as you read it. If you’re not sure, put a dot so you can go back to it. Either way, move quickly to cross off or dot each answer choice.Now check Choices (C) and (D).One at a time, either cross off or put a dot next to each answer. Typically, you’ll have three crossed off and one dotted, so go with the dot and get to the next question. If you have two answer choices dotted, check them to see which is more likely. If you can’t tell, that’s okay: take a guess, circle the question in the test booklet, and come back to it later with the remaining time.

When does this strategy fail? When you go straight for the answer choices without thinking of your own answer first. What happens then is that you get caught in the trap of wrong answers, where you read each answer and think, “Maybe that’s it,” and spend all this time going back and forth to the passage. Don’t do that.

Also, don’t doubt your own answer when you read the answer choices. Sure, the correct answer knows the depth and detail better than you — but so do the three wrong answers! Trust yourself to answer the question well enough! No matter how far off your answer is, it’ll be close enough to cross off three wrong answers.

No one gets a perfect score on the SAT Reading Test, so don’t kill yourself trying to. It’s okay to miss a question here and there — but it’s not okay to spend five minutes on one question.