<p>I have been working for over a month on the reading comprehension section for the SAT, but with little success. How should I improve? I always err on the implying and inference questions. </p>
<p>*Don't tell me to read more, because I don't have time to go around reading little fantasy books. What is the tip to infer correctly what the author means in certain sections in the passage?</p>
<p>I have no idea how to train this other than practice. Take a nice english course. I took AP English Language and Bam, I got an 800 in CR. It's really something you pick up and not something you cram in, imho.</p>
<p>The only way to study is a) read read read, but not fluff, read stuff with actual literary value, b) get used to the format of the test
those are more ore less the only two things you can do to improve--since your don't want tip a, you only have tip b left---I'd say, if you don't have time to read you're not gonna improve, find time. Take a book on the bus, read before you sleep, during lunch, whatever.
I followed tip a and b and hit 800.</p>
<p>Oh that reminds me. I rarely read other than required material, which there is a lot of. I think it only helps up to a point, and other than that itis hard to train.</p>
<p>Critical reading is so hard for me... I took over 10 practice and i only raised my score from 450 to 580... I need advies also.</p>
<p>Critical reading is the one section on the SAT that you can't prep endlessly for and hope to improve that much (most people that is). I'm sorry you think you don't have time to go around reading little fantasty books, but reading comprehension is something people pick up by doing just that for years. If you want to improve your score you better make time to read; there really aren't a lot of tricks, especially on the inference question. A good reader, as they are reading, will naturally ask themselves, What is the author trying to say? What evidence does the passage providet that supports his viewpoint? And then when you get to the inference questions, you are in a good spot.</p>
<p>One tit bit of advice that works for me: Do some untime practice at first. Dissect the passage as best as you can, and mark your test booklet with everything you know about the passage as you go along. When you start out, you shouldn't care about the practice score at all. You want to make sure that you understand the passage, and the types of questions being asked. Most imporant thing however: Review the practice tests carefully!! not only the questions you got wrong but also those you got right as well. As you practice more and more, it should come to you naturally. There is no point in doing 10 practice tests without any reviewing.</p>
<p>Also, there is plenty of time to read. Pick up a daily newspaper and read some real articles, not the comic section. </p>
<p>Hope this helps. Good luck.</p>
<p>o right, and underline important statements in the passage...that helped me too</p>
<p>One thing they told us to do in the class I took was to go through each answer option one by one and use a process of elimination to get to the right one. The things to look for when eliminating answers were "contradictory" (it directly contradicts something in the original passage), "not mentioned" (if it's not literally stated in the passage, even if it can be inferred, it's probably wrong), "true but irrelevant" (it's in the passage but doesn't answer the question), and I can't remember if there were any others. I went from a 740 to an 800... don't know how much of that was natural improvement (I really only took the course for math, which it didn't help with at all), but the strategy I described helped me decide in some cases when I was hesitating between two answers.</p>
<p>1.Get a high frequency vocab list and study all the words or study the dictionary if you have time. One alphabet a day. You'll skip over tonnes of words since you either already know them or you just never hear people use them.
2. Read the ENTIRE passage before you answer the questions. This improved my raw score from about a 55/67 to a 64/67(on practice tests).
3. Dont waste your time reading magazines/articles, get as many SAT CR practice tests and master how to take the test.</p>
<p>I would be the perfect example of improving a verbal score. I took the Oct. 2005 test and got a 640. Not too spectacular. After taking AP English and Compostion and reading all of those confusing passages from the 18th century, I somehow saw the MC questions on SAT passages to be much easier than before. I took the June 06 SAT and then got a 770. I was surprised at the large increase, but I think that it could have been higher if I had studied more vocab especially from Kaplan Review Books.</p>
<p>I agree with some of the other posts already made. I've taken the SAT twice, with about 8 months in between the first and second time, and before the 2nd time I studied only for the math (cram). My math stayed the exact same and yet my verbal (whatever the hell it's called) went up from 680 to 770 and my writing score was 780. I didn't expect the verbal to go up that much, or to do that well on writing. However, I think these are skills that are just generally acquired over time. After writing so many essays and reading so many passages, you are able to identify mistakes easily. Math...is another story.</p>
<p>I agree with the advice posted EXCEPT the vocab studying part. Studying vocab is a huggggeeee waste of time, time best spent on practicing with passages.</p>
<p>Just practice reading SAT passages as everyone said...if you are a scientist then you should already be thinking critically about a passage, since in science we always want to question the validity of a fellow scientist's research (hence citations). Otherwise just look for patterns and consistencies in each test.</p>
<p>i got 760. I didn't bother reading books or anything, they don't help.</p>
<p>just study the blue book inside out, and get the online course. you just have to gain familiarity with the SAT passages. sometimes, it's not about finding the right answer, but finding the answer that isn't wrong. also, read the passages literally, nothing is inferred by the author.</p>