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=20130424 (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 B. “Because” requires a verb in the second part of the sentence and there isn’t one. For example, it could have said, “…because near-zero water temperatures and the typically rocky and unstable nature of stream beds are dangerous.” So, “because” could be changed to “due to” and that would eliminate the need for a verb.
Let’s move on to the ACT question because it might be a little more interesting!
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.)
Wrong. It isn’t interesting at all. We just saw it a few weeks ago.
The answer is B. You probably did it by recognizing anytime a number or variable is multiplied times itself a number of times there’s a shorthand way to express it. You use an exponent. x times itself 4 times is expressed as x4. (Don’t you wish all the questions were this easy?)
You also could easily do the question or to check your work by using my strategy of “converting the abstract to the concrete” or “changing the algebra to arithmetic.” Substitute some number, for example use 2, for the variable x. 2 times itself four times is 16. Plug 2 into the answers and you are left with B and D. Oops, that means it looks like there are two right answers. So, try 3. Now only B is correct.
Yippee!! Wednesday is one of my favorite days of the week. It’s all downhill until Friday. We are over the hump of the week and the weekend is within sight. Enjoy.
Wizard
