The Critical Reader, Fourth Edition: The Complete Guide to SAT Reading

Book Preface

Eight years elapsed between my last SAT®, which I took as a senior in high school, and the first time I was asked to tutor reading for the SAT. I distinctly remember sitting in Barnes & Noble, hunched over the Official Guide, staring at the questions in horror and wondering how on earth I had ever gotten an 800 at the age of 17. Mind you, I felt completely flummoxed by the SAT after I had spent four years studying literature in college.
Somehow or other, I managed to muddle through my first reading tutoring sessions. I tried to pretend that I knew what I was doing, but to be perfectly honest, I was pretty lost. I had to look up answers in the back of the book. A lot. I lost count of the number of times I had to utter the words, “I think you’re right, but give me one second and let me just double-check that answer … ” It was mortifying. No tutor wants to come off as clueless in front of a sixteen­year-old, but I was looking like I had no idea what I was doing. Grammar I could handle, but when it came to teaching reading, I was in way over my head. I simply had no idea how to put into words what had always come naturally to me. Besides, half the time I wasn’t sure of the right answer myself.
Luckily for me, fate intervened in the form of Laura Wilson, the founder of WilsonPrep in Chappaqua, New York, whose company I spent several years writing tests for. Laura taught me about the major passage themes, answer choices patterns, and structures. I learned the importance of identifying the main point, tone and major transitions, as well as the ways in which that information can allow a test-taker to spot correct answers quickly, efficiently, and without second-guessing. I discovered that the skills that the SAT tested were in fact the exact same skills that I had spent four years honing.
As a matter of fact, I came to realize that, paradoxically, my degree in French was probably more of an aid in teaching reading than a degree in English would have been. The basic French literary analysis exercise, known as the explication de texte lineaire, consists of close reading of a short excerpt of text, during which the reader explains how the text functions rhetorically from beginning to end – that is, just how structure, diction, and syntax work together to produce meaning and convey a particular idea or point of view. In other words, the same skills as those tested on the SAT – the old test as well as the new version. I had considered explications de texte a pointless exercise (Rhetoric? Who studies rhetoric anymore? That’s so nineteenth century!) and resented being forced to write them in college – especially during the year I spent at the Sorbonne, where I and my (French) classmates did little else – but suddenly I appreciated the skills they had taught me. Once I made the cmmection between what I had been studying all that time and the skills tested on the SAT, the test made sense. I found that I had something to fall back on when I was teaching and, for the first time, I found that I no longer had to constantly look up answers.
I still had a long way to go as a tutor, though: at first I clung a bit too rigidly to some methods (e.g., insisting that students circle all the transitions) and often did not leave my students enough room to find their own strategies. As I worked with more students, however, I began to realize just how little I could take for granted in terms of pre-existing skills: most of my students, it turned out, had significant difficulty even identifying the point of an argument, never mind summing it up in five or so words. A lot of them didn’t even realize that passages contained arguments at all; they thought that the authors were simply “talking about stuff.” As a result, it never even occurred to them to identify which ideas a given author did and did not agree with. When I instructed them to circle transitions like however and therefore as a way of identifying the key places in an argument, many of them found it overwhelming to do so at the same time they were trying to absorb the literal content of a passage. More than one student told me they could do one or the other, but not both at the same time. In one memorable gaffe, I told a student that while he often did not have to read every word of the more analytical passages, he did need to read all of the literary passages – only to have him respond that he couldn’t tell the difference. He thought of all the passages as literary because the blurbs above them all said they came from books, and weren’t all books “literary?” It never occurred to me to tell him that he needed to look for the word novel in the blurb above the passage in mder to identify works of fiction. When I pointed out to another student that he had answered a question incorrectly because he hadn’t realized that tl1e author of the passage disagreed witl1 a particular idea, he responded without a trace of irony that the author had spent a lot of time talking about tl1at idea. Apparently, no one had ever introduced him to the idea that writers often spend a good deal of time fleshing out ideas that they don’t agree with. And this was a student scoring in the mid-600s!
Eventually, I got it. I realized that I would have to spend more time – sometimes a lot more time – explaining basic contextual pieces of information that most adult readers took for granted and, moreover, I would have to do so at the same time I covered actual test-taking strategies. Without the fundamentals, all the strategy in the world might not even raise a student’s score by 10 points. My goal in this book is to supply some of those fundamentals while also covering some of the more advanced skills the exam requires.
I would, however, like to emphasize that tl1is book is intended to help you work through and “decode” College Board material. It is not – and should not be used as – a replacement for the Officinl Guide. To that end, I have provided a list of the Reading questions from the tests in the College Bonrd Officinl Guide, 2018 Edition (also available through the Khan Academy website), cmresponding to the relevant question type at the end of each chapter.
As you work through this book, you will undoubtedly notice that some of the passages are reused in multiple exercises. Although you may find it somewhat tedious to work through the same passages multiple times, that repetition was a deliberate choice on my part. This book is not designed to have you whiz through passage after passage, but rather to have you study the workings of a limited number of passages in depth. As you work through the exercises, you may also notice that different questions accompanying the same passage are targeting the same concepts, merely from different angles. Again, that is a deliberate choice. The goal is to allow you to solidify your understanding of these concepts and the various ways in which they can be tested so that they will leap out at you when you are taking the test for real.
In addition, I have done my best to select passages that reflect the content and themes of the redesigned SAT. The new exam focuses much more heavily than the old on science and social science topics, with a notable focus on the recent onslaught of new technologies (the Internet, the rise of social media, “green” energy) and new business models (flexible and individual vs. company-based and traditional), as well as the consequences of those developments. While some passages will address their downsides, you can assume that the overwhelming emphasis will be on their positive aspects.
That said, this book can of course provide no more than an introduction to the sorts of topics you are likely to encounter on the SAT. While the College Board has been very vociferous (to invoke an “irrelevant” term) about proclaiming that the redesigned test will reflect exactly what students are shtdying in school, the reality is of course a good deal more complex. Common Core or no Common Core, American high schools have nothing even remotely resembling a common curriculum, with the result that a student at High School A might emerge from AP US History having read dozens of primary source documents from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while a student at High School B the next town over might emerge from what is nominally the same class having read only a few such documents. No short-term SAT prep program can easily compensate for knowledge gaps built up over a dozen years or more. So while some of the passages you encounter on the test may indeed seem familiar and accessible, others may seem very foreign. A list of suggested reading resources is provided on the following page, and I strongly encourage you to spend 15 minutes or so a day exploring them.
Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a “pure” reading test. To some extent, your ability to understand what you read is always bound up with your existing knowledge. Research shows that when students whose overall reading skills are weak are asked to read about subjects they are highly familiar with, their comprehension is better than that of students with stronger general reading skills.1 The more familiar you are with a subject, the less time and energy you will need to spend trying to understand a passage about it, and the faster you’ll move through the test. You’ll also be familiar with any vocabulary associated with the topic, which means you won’t have to worry as much about keeping track of new terminology.
Moreover, you will probably find it much easier to identify correct and incorrect answer choices. While it is true that answers that are true in the real world will not necessarily be right, it is also tr·ue that correct answers will not be false in the real world. If you see an answer that you know is factually true based on your pre-existing knowledge of a topic, you can potentially save yourself a lot of time by checking that answer first.
Finally, encountering a passage about a subject you already know something about can be very calming on a high-pressure test like the SAT because you will no longer be dealing with a frightening unknown. Instead of trying to assimilate a mass of completely new information in the space of a few minutes, you can instead place what you are reading in the context of your existing knowledge.
Provided that you have solid comprehension skills and contextual knowledge, success in Reading is also largely a question of approach, or method. Because the test demands a certain degree of flexibility – no single sh·ategy can be guaranteed to work 100% of the time – I have also tried to make this book a toolbox of sorts. My goal is to provide you with a variety of approaches and strategies that you can choose from and apply as necessary, depending on the question at hand. Whenever possible, I have provided multiple explanations for questions, showing how you might arrive at the answer by working in different ways and from different sets of starting assumptions. The ability to adapt is what will ultimately make you unshakeable – even at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning.

~Erica Meltzer