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?questionId=20131113&oq=1 (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. Always attack Sentence Completion questions by determining the sentence’s topic. What does it tell us about the subject (as in subject/predicate) of the sentence? The subject is the conversation and we know the gravity (seriousness) of the topic “contrasted” with their tone. We need to predict a word that is the opposite of seriousness before looking at the answers. I predicted “not serious” and “frivolous.”
Even if you don’t know “lightness” means “not serious,” look at the other words and eliminate as many as you can. I bet you know those words. Often this is a game of elimination. When you can’t exactly give a definition for a word, just ask yourself, “Does the word have anything to do with topic, in this case, not serious?” That process will eliminate many words that you can’t quite define–you’ll have a sense of what they mean and know if they go along with the topic or not. If they don’t, get rid of them because the right answer is always consistent with the topic of the sentence.
Let’s see what the ACT folks have for us this morning.
ACT Question of the Day: Use your “back” button to return to my website after reading the ACT Question of the Day.
I hope you avoided following the ACT “Directions” (yuck) that tell you to read the whole passage before answering any questions. Shame on them. Just scan to the underlined #13. The whole passage is irrelevant just like it is on any of the other questions.
The answer is C. The original “lecture proof” is wrong because she isn’t going to lecture about proof! B is wrong because “proof” is a noun and in context you need the verb “prove.” D is just nonsense because it is the same problem as the original “lecture proof” issue. That leaves C. It is correct because once the comma is there the following phrase supports and describes the noun “she.” The phrase is an “appositive” stating “she” is “proof that…”
Do you want some proof(!) that practicing my strategies will raise your scores? Schools have collected the data that shows that these techniques have raised students scores an average of 180-212 points in reading and math combined. One group of students who started at 1290 ended up at 1510 (only reading and math) after just 12 hours of focused work with the Wizard. They ended up at MIT, Ivy League schools, and Duke. Get to work and join the club!
The SAT & ACT Wizard
