SAT Emergency!!?

Question

I'm taking the SAT next year!! I recently bought the The Collegeboard SAT Study Guide. I have been reading some passages to know how well i'm doing. The bottom line is that the content of the passage is hard to understand. How can I excel in the SAT critical reading section? Some tips please.

I'm too frustrated. !

Answer 1

you should probably take some SAT prep classes. i've heard that princeton review is a really good one. good luck!

Answer 2

Princeton Review offers SAT classes, so does Kaplan

The best thing is to do a lot of practice tests. The more of these difficult passages that you read, the easier they will become to understand. Just keep on doing practice tests. Oh, and buying an SAT Words book may prove beneficial too. The book will go over the more difficult vocabulary words that will pop up in these reading passages and in other sections of the Reading section of the SAT

Answer 3

Having tutored students for the SATs for 20 years and having many of them get perfect scores on their linguistic part I have come to some interesting conclusions. Other than practice, practice, practice, there are a couple of other strategies. First of all, if you are having trouble understanding the content, it means that you have a lack of general knowledge. In order to 'de-code' the abstract of reading, your brain must activate your schema(ta). The person's schema(ta) is the sum total of all their knowledge. Reading is an interesting activity in that, words by themselves are abstract until the reader brings meaning to them. The meaning required is found in the knowledge that the reader posesses. The second strategy is to use logic and cause and effect. This will also improve with the acquisition of general knowledge. So, how do you get general knowledge? Start by reading general knowledge based magazines such as Natn'l Geogr., Science, literary magazines, Historical/Anthropological magz ie. Smithsonian...watch Jeopardy, watch the history channel...start becoming a 'global' student...study the world around you....One more hint, especially about the vocab component. Instead of memorizing thousands of words, memorize the Greek/Latin/Germanic/French prefixes, suffixes and roots and this will give you the tools to 'decode' words which will become a life-long useful skill not just for the SATs. I also trained international teachers how to teach EFL, especially in Asian countries where vocab & rule memorization is legendarily useless, using the above strategy. So, since you have till next year, start now, it's not too late and lots and lots of luck and success to you.

Answer 4

dk, if you are taking the SAT and it is not in your native tongue, this makes it extremely much harder. As I have said as a retired teacher, writing and reading in your none native tongue unless you master another language early in life, is difficult. It is because all languages have "slang" and inferred meanings. Don't feel bad, I am 56, and just talking to teenagers confuses me. This might give you a little laugh for your stress, I was working as a cashier in a big dept store and some 14 year olds came up and placed some "flip flaps" plastic type sandals on the counter and being 56, I said "oh what pretty thongs". Well, I didn't know thongs now meant underwear, little bitty underwear, we used to call those kind of plastic sandals thongs when I was a kid and there wasn't any tiny thong underwear, but the poor teenagers turned ten shades of red, and I looked at them puzzled. So see, it happens in USA to USA people, but it is that kind of thing that makes it harder when not in your native tongue. Most foreign languages (I took 6 years of French) are "formal" and they told me if I went to France, I would have a hard time because I , like most, had been taught the formal French. Hope this helps. One could be very smart, but if trying to take the SAT in their non-native tongue, they too would greatly struggle.