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=20130929&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 B. As usual, the key to answering the question is to determine the topic and predict a word for the blank before looking at the answers. Although tells us there’s going to be a switch in direction in the sentence and seems to have been a fixture tells us we would think that the market had been there forever. So, we are looking for a word that means it has not been there forever. Only Answer B, recently, works.
In class yesterday, some students missed a question because they didn’t notice the word although as being a key part of the sentence. Of course, they learned how important it was to getting the right answer and won’t be making that mistake again. The test writers like to use words that I think of as directional clues. Words and phrases like although, nevertheless, on the other hand, and despite signal a change in direction. When you see them in a Sentence Completion Question, you should underline them so that you realize the answer is going to have the opposite meaning of the general direction of the sentence. Unless, of course, you want to miss the question!
Let’s see what the ACT folks have for us today.
ACT Question of the Day: Use your “back” button to return to my website after reading the ACT Question of the Day.
Oh yes, the famous “stick in the ground” passage for the ACT Science Test is what they have for us!
The answer is F. They tell you in the first paragraph of Experiment 1 that the stick is “1 meter” above the ground. They also tell you in the very first paragraph that the experiments are done at different times of the year and the charts tell you the direction and lengths of the shadow vary. That information makes Answer F a pretty easy answer to choose.
This question exemplifies what you need to understand about the ACT Science Test. The science you will need to know is going to be explained and the answers will be right in the passage. When you attack a science passage just get a general sense of what the science is all about. In this case, for example, it is about the shadow of a stick in the ground pointing different directions and having different lengths. Just looking at the tables very quickly tells you that. Don’t bother to worry about the details when you first look at a table, chart, or graph. Reading the labels is sufficient. Then when you get to the questions, they will tell you what details to search for in the data. Doing so is going to increase your speed and help you finish more questions which will raise your score.
It’s Sunday. Kick back and relax for a while today. I’m looking forward to seeing my students today. I’ll be tutoring and visiting classrooms where some excellent teachers are teaching my program.
The SAT & ACT Wizard
