Critical Reading Questions

Test Preparation SAT Preparation
1

<p>Hi, I have some doubts with the following questions after I did some practices with the BB (1st Edition).</p>

<p>BB Pg 467
This excerpt from a novel by a Chinese American author is about a Chinese American woman named June. During a family dinner party attended by some of June’s Chinese American friends, Waverly, a tax attorney, discusses an advertisement that June wrote for her.</p>

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<p>Waverly laughed in a lighthearted way. “ I mean, really, June.” And then she started in a deep-television-announcer voice. “Three benefits, three needs, three reasons to buy... Satisfaction guaranteed...”</p>

<p>She said this in such a funny way that everybody thought it was a good joke and laughed. And then, to make matters worse, I heard my mother saying to Waverly: “True, one can’t teach style. June is not sophisticated like you. She must have been born this way.”</p>

<p>(Line 10) I was surprised at myself, how humiliated I felt. I had been outsmarted by Waverly once again, and now betrayed by my own mother.</p>

<p>Question: In the context of the passage, the statement “I was surprised at myself" (line 10) suggests that June
A) had been unaware of the extent of her emotional vulnerability.
B) was exasperated that she allowed Waverly to embarrass her in public.
C) was amazed that she could dislike anyone so much
D) had not realized that her mother admired her friend Waverly
E) felt guilty about how much she resented her own mother.</p>

<p>I narrowed the choices to A and B before selecting B. It was a hard choice because of the relevant portion at line 10 “I was surprised ...betrayed by my own mother” To me, the wording used – “humiliated”, “outsmarted”, “betrayed” – seemed to support B but the start – “I was surprised at myself” – supported A.</p>

<p>Can anyone explain the reasoning for A as the answer?</p>

<p>BB pg 469</p>

<h2>This passage is from a book of nature writing published in 1991.</h2>

<p>In North America, bats fall into mainly predictable categories: they are nocturnal, eat insects, and are rather small. But winging through their lush, green-black world, tropical bats are more numerous and have more exotic habits than do temperate species. Some of them feed on nectar that bat-pollinated trees have evolved to profit from their visits. Carnivorous bats like nothing better than a local frog, lizard, fish or bird, which they pluck from the foliage or a moon lit pond. Of course, some bats are vampires and dine on blood. In the movies, vampires are rather showy, theatrical types, but vampire bats rely on stealth and small, pinprick incisions made by razory, triangular front teeth. Sleeping livestock are their usual victims, and they take care not to wake them. First, they make the classic incisions shaped like quotation marks; then, with saliva full of anti-coagulants so that the victim’s blood will flow nicely, they quietly lap their fill. Because this anticoagulant is not toxic to humans, vampire bats may one day play an important role in the treatment of heart patients – that is, if we can just get over our phobia about them. Having studied them intimately, I now know that bats are sweet-tempered, useful, and fascinating creatures. The long-standing fear that many people have about bats tell us less about bats than about human fear.</p>

<p>Things that live by night live outside the realm of “normal” time. Chauvinistic about our human need to wake by day and sleep by night, we come to associate night dwellers with people up to no good, people who have the jump on the rest of us and are defying nature, defying their circadian rhythms.* Also, night is when we dream, and so we picture the bats moving through a dreamtime, in which reality is warped. After all, we do not see very well at night; we do not need to. But that makes us nearly defenceless after dark. Although we are accustomed to mastering our world by day, in the night we become vulnerable as prey. Thinking of bats as masters of the night threatens the safety we daily take for granted. Though we are at the top of our food chain, if we had to live along in the rainforest, say, and protect ourselves against roaming predators, we would live partly in terror, as our ancestors did. Our sense of safety depends on predictability, so anything living outside the usual rules we suspect to be an outlaw, a ghoul.</p>

<p>(Third paragraph) Bats have always figured as frightening or supernatural creatures in the mythology, religion, and superstition of peoples everywhere. Finnish peasants once believed that their souls rose from their bodies while they slept and flew around the countryside as bats, then returned to them by morning. Ancient Egyptians prized bat parts as medicine for a variety of diseases. Perhaps the most mystical, ghoulish, and intimate relationship between bats and humans occurred among the Maya about two thousand years ago. Zotzilaha Chamalcan, their bat god, had a human body but the stylized head and wings of a bat. His image appears often on their altars, pottery, gold ornaments, and stone pillars. One especially frightening engraving shows the bat god with outstretched wings and a question-mark nose, its tongue wagging with hunger, as it holds a human corpse in one hand and the human’s heart in the other. A number of other Central American cultures raised the bat to the ultimate height: as god of death and the underworld. But it was Bram Stoker’s riveting novel Dracular that turned small, furry mammals into huge, bloodsucking monsters in the minds of English-speaking people. If vampires were semihuman, then they could fascinate with their conniving cruelty, and thus a spill of horror books began to appear about the human passions of vampires.
*circadian rhythms are patterns of daily change within one’s body that are determined by the time of day or night. </p>

<p>Question: The author develops the third paragraph (line 43 – 66) by presenting
A) different side of a single issue
B) details that culminate in truth
C) a thesis that followed by specific illustrations
D) a common argument followed by a refutation of it
E) a common opinion and the reasons it is held</p>

<p>My two choices were C and E. </p>

<p>The pertinent portion to me was the introduction of the paragraph : “Bats have always figured as frightening or supernatural creatures in the mythology, religion, and superstition of peoples everywhere.”. It was more of a common opinion than of a thesis statement. </p>

<p>However, the book answer is C. Is it because the details that follow are not the reasons for the opinion but specific examples that support the introduction of the paragraph? Thanks</p>

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<p>Q1. The “how humiliated I felt” points to A since it indicates that she hadn’t realized she could have been so hurt in the situation, ie: so vulnerable.</p>

<p>B isn’t a good choice b/c use of exasperated indicates annoyance and the assumption that June acted actively in the situation by defending herself or something which is not the case.</p>

<p>Q2. The first statement doesn’t actually state an opinion because you don’t have any of the trigger words to indicate opinion (in my view, in my belief, etc.). Instead it functions as a thesis since it describes a condition in reality and the rest of the 3rd paragraph provides specific examples.</p>

3

<p>Thanks alot dfa4ever!</p>

<p>I just did another critical reading section and have some questions.</p>

<p>Blue Book pg 484 – 485</p>

<p>Since the advent of television, social commentators have been evaluating its role in a modern society. In the following excerpt from an essay published in 1992, a German social commentator offers a pointed evaluation of the evaluators.</p>

<p>“Television makes you stupid.”
Virtually all current theories of the medium come down to this simple statement. As a rule, this conclusion is delivered with a melancholy undertone. Four principal theories can be distinguished. </p>

<p>The manipulation thesis points to an ideological dimension. It sees in television above all an instrument of political domination. The medium is understood as a neutral vessel, which pours out opinions over a public thought of as passive. Seduced, unsuspecting viewers are won over by the wire-pullers, without actually realizing what is happening to them.</p>

<p>The imitation thesis argues primarily in moral terms. According to it, television consumption leads above all to moral dangers. Anyone who is exposed to the medium becomes habituated to libertinism, irresponsibility, crime and violence. The private consequences are blunted, callous and obstinate individuals; the public consequences are the loss of social virtues and general moral decline. This form of critique draws, as is obvious at first glance, on traditional, bourgeois sources. The motifs that recur in this thesis can be identified as far back as the eighteenth century in the vain warnings that early cultural criticism sounded against the dangers of reading novels.</p>

<p>More recent is the simulation thesis. According to it, the viewer is rendered incapable of distinguishing between reality and fiction. The primary reality is rendered unrecognizable or replaced by a secondary, phantom-like reality. </p>

<p>All these converge in the stupefaction thesis. According to it, watching television not only undermines the viewer’s ability to criticise and differentiate, along with the moral and political fibre of their being, but also impairs their overall ability to perceive. Television produces, therefore, a new type of human being, who can, according to taste, be imagined as a zombie or mutant.</p>

<p>All these theories are rather unconvincing. Their authors consider proof to be superfluous. Even the minimal criterion of plausibility does not worry them at all. To mention just one example, no one has succeeded in putting before us even a single viewer who was incapable of telling the difference between a family quarrel in the current soap opera and one at his or her family’s breakfast table. This doesn’t seem to bother the advocates of the simulation thesis.</p>

<p>Another common feature of the theories is just as curious but has even more serious consequences. Basically, the viewers appear as defenceless victims, the programmers as crafty criminals. This polarity is maintained with great seriousness: manipulators and manipulated, actors and imitators, stimulants and simulated, stupefiers and stupefied face one another in a fine symmetry.</p>

<p>The relationship of the theorists themselves to television raises some important questions. Either the theorists make no use of television at all (in which case they do not know what they are talking about) or they subject themselves to it, and then the question arises – through what miracle is the theorist able to escape the alleged effects of television? Unlike everyone else, the theorist has remained completely intact morally, can distinguish in a sovereign manner between deception and reality, and enjoys complete immunity in the face of the idiocy that he or she sorrowfully diagnoses in the rest of us. Or could – fatal loophole in the dilemma – the theorists themselves be symptoms of a universal stupefaction?</p>

<p>One can hardly say that these theorists have failed to have any effect. It is true that their influence on what is actually broadcast is severely limited, which may be considered distressing or noted with gratitude, depending on one’s mood. On the other hand, they have found ready listeners among politicians. That is not surprising, for the conviction that one is dealing with millions of idiots “out there in the country” is part of the basic psychological equipment of the professional politician. One might have second thoughts about the theorists’ influence when one watches how the veterans of televised election campaigns fight each other for every single minute when it comes to displaying their limousine, their historic appearances before the guard of honor, their hairstyles on the platform, and above all their speech organs. The number of broadcast minutes, the camera angles, and the level of applause are registered with a touching enthusiasm. The politicians have been particularly taken by the good old manipulation thesis.</p>

<p>Questions:
The author makes the comparison to the novel in lines 21-24 in order to
A) point out television’s literary origins.
B) Underscore the general decline of culture
C) Emphasize television’s reliance on visual imagery
D) Expose narrow-minded resistance to new forms of expression
E) Attack the cultural shortcomings of television producers.</p>

<p>My choices were A and D. But I came down to A because of “[t]his form of critique …the dangers of reading novels”, most notably the use of “traditional, bourgeois sources”. Can anyone shed light on why it should be D?</p>

<p>The author responds to the four theories of television primarily by
A) Offering contrary evidence
B) Invoking diverse authorities
C) Adding historical perspectives
D) Blurring the line between the manipulator and the manipulated
E) Implying that no reasonable person should take them seriously.</p>

<p>My answer was A because the passage’s structure gave the impression that the author had presented the theories before he rebutted them in the subsequent paragraphs. The correct answer is E. After closer examination of the crucial paragraph - “All these theories are rather unconvincing…” – the impression I have is that E is more specific compared to A. </p>

<p>In mapping out categories of theories about television, the author uses which of the following?
A) Earnest revaluation
B) Incredulous analysis of academic documentation
C) Somber warnings about the future
D) Intentional falsification of data
E) Description tinged with irony</p>

<p>My answer was A. The correct one is E. I am not sure how this is arrived at and where the supporting details are found in the passage.</p>

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<p>“The motifs that recur in this thesis can be identified as far back as the eighteenth century in the vain warnings that early cultural criticism sounded against the dangers of reading novels.”</p>

<p>People today are critical of watching T.V. and its dangers.
People back then were critical of reading novels.
In this case, a motif is a recurring theme in history. We can conclude that the comparison shows that throughout history people have been resisting “new forms of expression” (i.e., novels when they were introduced centuries ago, and now the television). The passage basically criticizes the criticism of television, which is a relatively new form of expression. By making the comparison to novels, which were a new form of expression in the eighteenth century, we can generalize by saying that the same can be said for new forms of expression in general.</p>

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<p>The author doesn’t present a theory at all. Where do you get that? He just describes the theories that he does not believe to be reasonable. That’s all. He doesn’t take the theories seriously; therefore, he is implying in the passage that no reasonable person should take them seriously either. (E) is actually less specific than (A) because (A) is restricted to actual, indicative, and contrary evidence against a theory, whereas a simple opposition could imply that a theory is not reasonable, as marked by (E).</p>

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<p>This question is similar to the previous one. The author is simply describing the theories, and giving his feedback in an ironic way. He does not offer his own theory, and doesn’t approach the topic in an earnest way.</p>

5

<p>“Their authors consider proof to be superfluous. Even the minimal criterion of plausibility does not worry them at all.”</p>

<p>crazybandit explains everything clearly but I wanted to focus your attention on the above quote.
This quote mocks the authors of the TV theories and thus lends an ironic tone to the entire piece. Once you catch this important clue, then the answers to your questions are pretty clear because it is obvious the excerpt is mocking the TV theorists.</p>

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<p>Thanks crazybandit for the detailed explanations and dfa4ever. </p>

<p>I just want to clarify about my thought process in selecting the answers.</p>

<p>You asked where did I get the impression that “he was presenting a theory?”. I read the ensuing paragraphs as supporting the answer choice, i.e. he was presenting details that gave a different side to the theories. </p>

<p>I took all those details as contrary evidence against a theory, and not as “a simple opposition could imply that a theory is not reasonable”. How do you deduce what the author mentioned as the latter? Is it because in your view, he did not substantially present “actual, indicative evidence” to the contrary, in the form of alternative theories in support of what he mentioned? </p>

<p>The last three paragraphs to me were the author’s evidence towards his point that the theories were “unconvincing” and in a way offered “contrary evidence”.</p>

<p>I agree that for the second question, on a second reading, I got the same impression about the way the author maps out the theories. Thanks dfa4ever, you are right in saying that by focusing on the one sentence, you clearly see the irony in the description.</p>

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<p>“That is not surprising, for the conviction that one is dealing with millions of idiots “out there in the country” is part of the basic psychological equipment of the professional politician.”</p>

<p>You are focusing too much on the content of the writing and now enough on the style of the writing. The above quote (last paragraph) and the sentences that follow are clearly mocking in tone and therefore cannot be taken analytically/seriously as “contrary evidence”</p>

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<p>Thanks dfa4ever! I got the part on the tone of the writing. I will endeavour not to repeat the same mistake.</p>

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<p>Welcome =)</p>

<p>I’ve found that by paying special attention to two parts of any sentence helps with comprehension:

  1. Adjectives–are they positive/negative? simple/extravagant?
  2. Verbs–proactive/reactive? positive/negative? simple/complicated?
    By looking at the adjectives and verbs, you can get a good grasp on subject matter/tone which does wonders on MC tests =)</p>
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<p>Can you give examples of the positive/negative adjectives? Because sometimes I do not get the tone correct even though I understood the passage.</p>

<p>As for the verbs, what you mean by proactive vs reactive? Once again, thanks for sharing with me your strategies.</p>

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<p>exactly. Just because he presents his opinion does not mean he presents his own “theory.” You are misconstruing what a theory is. A theory is serious, technical, and almost scientific.</p>

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<p>Once again, “evidence” is almost like a scientific term. Just because the author opposes a theory does not mean he has evidence against the theory. If a theory said that the sun was blue, I’d give an ironic statement like, “so why is the sun red?” Obviously that is not evidence. I could use logic and reasoning to support my opposition to the theory, but for there to be “evidence” or a “theory” opposing the theory there would have to be some sort of experimental or technical explanation. In such a situation, the sun’s being blue is so ridiculous that evidence, experimentation, or the formation of an actual counter-theory is unnecessary. Using language, an ironic tone, and reasoning is enough to criticize the theory.</p>

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<p>Thanks crazybandit !! Really appreciate your detailed input!</p>

<p>I have some doubts on the following questions:</p>

<p>Short Passage:</p>

<p>The critic Edmund Wilson was not a self conscious letter writer or one who tried to sustain studied mannerisms. Nor did he resort to artifice or entangle himself in circumlocutions. The young, middle-aged, and old Wilson speaks directly through his letters, which are informal for the most part and which undisguisedly reflect his changing moods. On occasion - in response, perhaps to the misery of a friend or a public outrage or a personal challenge - he can become eloquent, even passionate, but that is not his prevailing tone.</p>

<p>Q1. Based on the information in the passage, Wilson’s letters can best be described as
A) cynical
B) spontaneous
C) critical
D) preachy
E) witty</p>

<p>My answer is B. It is correct but it took me pretty long to reason it out. “not a self-conscious letter writer” cancels out C, “artifice or entangle himself in circumlocutions” cancels out D because he does not sermonise (if I may use). He is just plain direct and his mood does changes from time from time but not always, leading me to choose B. Dfa4ever, what’s your take?</p>

<ol>
<li>The reference to the “young, middle-aged, and old Wilson” (line 4) serves to suggest the
A) multifaceted nature of Wilson’s literary persona
B) maturity Wilson displayed even as a youth
C) effect aging had on Wilson’s temperament
D) longevity of Wilson’s literary career
E) consistency of Wilson’s letter-writing style</li>
</ol>

<p>My answer was A. The line reference, to me, suggests that Wilson’s target audience is not limited to a particular age group. Correct me if I had been over-presumptuous. However, the correct answer is E. Why consistency? Is it because of “[o]n occasion - in response, perhaps to the misery of a friend or a public outrage or a personal challenge - he can become eloquent, even passionate, but that is not his prevailing tone”?</p>

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<p>Q1. Spontaneous is the most obvious answer because: “which undisguisedly reflect his changing moods” None of the other choices captures the general theme of constant change described by the paragraph.</p>

<p>Q2. You are missing out on the second part of the sentence which is more important: Wilson (young, middle-aged, old) always “speaks directly through his letters”. The paragraph is saying that at any age, Wilson spoke directly through his letters which suggests consistency in Wilson’s letter-writing style. Here the “letter-writing style” refers to “speaks directly through his letters”</p>

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<p>Positive/Negative adjective examples:</p>

<p>Positive: Determined vs. Negative: Stubborn --both could refer to an event where a person keeps attempting to achieve a certain result</p>

<p>Positive: Persistant vs. Negative: Nagging --both refer to a distraught student calling the admissions office</p>

<p>I believe the key here is not to necessarily learn 1 million vocab words but instead to learn the nuances of different words.</p>

<p>Proactive/Reactive Verbs</p>

<p>Proactive is when the subject is willingly/actively pursuing certain actions whereas reactive refers to actions taken/committed in response to something.
Proactive: I called her.
Reactive: I returned her call/I answered her call
By looking at how the subject matter is acting, it can help discern tone/meaning.</p>

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<p>Hmm, is it me or is it that all of these questions require a very literal interpretation of the text? Thing is, English class through high school has conditioned me to go so much deeper in the text to the extent that it just feels wrong to pick very literal choices. Gosh I hate CR. /rant</p>