If you are reading this in an email you received from me, do not click the link to sat.collegeboard.org below. Use the link to my website that is farther down on the email. If you are seeing this in my blog, do the SAT Question of the Day by clicking on this link:
http://sat.collegeboard.org/practice/sat-question-of-the-day?src=R&questionId=20130426 (This link takes you to today’s question. If you use my archive, you will see the question related to my SAT explanation for that date.)
The answer is C. Every Sentence Completion question can be best attacked using the same strategy. Begin by determining the topic of the sentence and then predicting a word or words for the blank(s) before looking at the answers. This sentence is about how Bowles wrote music but he also wrote something else and implies it is something (books, research, newspaper articles?) in addition to music. It is this latter form of writing that made him famous rather than his musical pieces. I try to predict a word based on a word I see in the sentence. In this case, I predicted “less acclaimed than” and “eclipsed by.” Then Answer C is the best answer. “Preclude,” Answer E, is attractive but it really means “to make something impossible.” His writing did not replace his composing or make it impossible; his writing just made him more famous as an author than as a composer.
Let’s see what the ACT staff has in store for us this morning.
http://www.act.org/qotd/ (The ACT staff does not put a date on their questions so if you click on an archived blog, you’ll get today’s question and the old explanation. Sorry. The SAT staff has dated their questions; so, the archive is helpful. The ACT folks simply don’t do that.)
The answer is F. As usual, the question isn’t about science per se, it is about reading charts and graphs. This question asks you to find low values for the concentrations of different ions and dissolved gases (and you don’t even need to know what “ions” and “dissolved gases” are). You just have to find the right columns in the chart for them and then figure out which row has the best match for the question. The only tricky part is that they ask you for Fe2+ and you may read Fe3+ by mistake which will make the question/answer perplexing.
The moral of this story is to not worry about reviewing a bunch of science for the test. Instead, you should practice reading charts and graphs and work on your speed. My students again remarked that the April ACT Science Reasoning Test was difficult to finish on time.
Enjoy your weekend. I hope when you look back on it Sunday night you feel like it was the best weekend you could have had.
Wizard
