sorry, i forgot to tag you @Apoc314
Do you have example questions I can help with, @kaleido ? I can help analyze and explain some of the questions and answers to help you learn to answer them correctly, and as you continue to improve your abilities, you will conquer the time challenge as well and be able to score well! Please post a couple of questions you have had difficulties with, and I’ll do my best to help you understand them. Thank you.
I followed your advice but only got a 790. Help pls what do I do???
@Apoc314 sorry to be a bother, but i don’t know where in the blue book my teacher got it from, she never told us the exact section. she also collected the tests so i don’t have access to it. i know you got the perfect score in CR, if you had time, instead of me posting a question that i had trouble with, could you post examples that you had trouble with, because if you had trouble with it, then i would most likely have trouble with it. And if i can’t answer them then you could help analyze them for me. The one’s I have trouble with are basically like the ones asking for a meaning in “this line… to that line” They word it very weirdly, so i have no idea what they’re trying to ask for. Thanks so much Apoc for your advice!
@kaleido , I will need to spend some time looking for CR examples that target the types of questions you are trying to improve on (big idea questions on multiple lines). I do not have my SAT Blue Book with me here at college, so I will do my best to look for relevant examples online and post a few examples here for you when I find the right ones. In the meantime, if you do come across any passages and questions you want me to help you with, please do post them here so I may help you if you would like. Thanks for your patience!
@Apoc314, thank you so much for your response. In the meantime while i wait for you, ill just keep practicing in the practice test sections of the blue book for CR. I will take your advice as you mentioned before that i should do it without timing myself. I should just keep practicing and practicing and keep doing it right, and ill get good from there right? Of course, i will wait for your guidance also.
Hi @kaleido ! Here is a passage and following questions I have found.
The passage is taken from a description of the life of certain Pacific Islanders written by a pioneering sociologist.
By the time a child is six or seven she has all the essential
avoidances well enough by heart to be trusted with the care of a
younger child. And she also develops a number of simple
techniques. She learns to weave firm square balls from palm
5 leaves, to make pinwheels of palm leaves or frangipani blossoms,
to climb a coconut tree by walking up the trunk on flexible little
feet, to break open a coconut with one firm well-directed blow of
a knife as long as she is tall, to play a number of group games
and sing the songs which go with them, to tidy the house by
10 picking up the litter on the stony floor, to bring water from the
sea, to spread out the copra to dry and to help gather it in when
rain threatens, to go to a neighboring house and bring back a
lighted ■■■■■■ for the chief’s pipe or the cook-house fire.
But in the case of the little girls all these tasks are merely
15 supplementary to the main business of baby-tending. Very small
boys also have some care of the younger children, but at eight or
nine years of age they are usually relieved of it. Whatever rough
edges have not been smoothed off by this responsibility for
younger children are worn off by their contact with older boys.
20 For little boys are admitted to interesting and important activities
only so long as their behavior is circumspect and helpful. Where
small girls are brusquely pushed aside, small boys will be
patiently tolerated and they become adept at making themselves
useful. The four or five little boys who all wish to assist at the
25 important, business of helping a grown youth lasso reef eels,
organize themselves into a highly efficient working team; one boy
holds the bait, another holds an extra lasso, others poke
eagerly about in holes in the reef looking for prey, while still
another tucks the captured eels into his lavalava. The small girls,
30 burdened with heavy babies or the care of little staggerers who are
too small to adventure on the reef, discouraged by the hostility
of the small boys and the scorn of the older ones, have
little opportunity for learning the more adventurous forms of work
and play. So while the little boys first undergo the
35 chastening effects of baby-tending and then have many
opportunities to learn effective cooperation under the supervision
of older boys, the girls’ education is less comprehensive. They
have a high standard of individual responsibility, but the
community provides them with no lessons in cooperation with one
40 another. This is particularly apparent in the activities of young
people: the boys organize quickly; the girls waste hours in
bickering, innocent of any technique for quick and efficient
cooperation.
Adapted from: Coming of Age in Samoa, Margaret Mead (1928)
- The primary purpose of the passage with reference to the society under discussion is to
A. explain some differences in the upbringing of girls and boys
B. criticize the deficiencies in the education of girls
C. give a comprehensive account of a day in the life of an average young girl
D. delineate the role of young girls
E. show that young girls are trained to be useful to adults
- The list of techniques in paragraph one could best be described as
A. household duties
B. rudimentary physical skills
C. important responsibilities
D. useful social skills
E. monotonous tasks
- It can be inferred that in the community under discussion all of the following are important except
A. domestic handicrafts
B. well-defined social structure
C. fishing skills
D. formal education
E. division of labor
- Which of the following if true would weaken the author's contention about 'lessons in cooperation' (line 39) ?
I Group games played by younger girls involve cooperation
II Girls can learn from watching boys cooperating
III Individual girls cooperate with their mothers in looking after babies
A. I only
B. II only
C. III only
D. I and II only
E. I, II and III
This passage and questions I have picked out are from http://www.majortests.com/sat/reading-comprehension-test02. Please give these questions a try - I just took this test and I did not get all of these selected questions incorrect, but I believe that they are similar to the questions you are having difficulty with. Below is my analysis of each question and correct answer.
-
Throughout this whole passage, we see the author describing the differences in girls and boys when they are growing up - we see the girls entrusted with more responsibility to care for the babies while the boys eventually move past that stage to learn cooperation with each other to “lasso reef eels” and other interesting activities. Thus, answer A is correct because this passage explains the differences in their upbringing. B is incorrect (though we may assume girls should have more education, the author never directly criticizes this system). C is incorrect since it doesn’t focus just on a day in the life of an average young girl but talks about girls and boys in general. D is incorrect because this passage doesn’t primarily solely focus on the role of young girls. E is incorrect because this passage again does show how the young girls become trained and useful to care for children, but this passage also focuses on how the boys are trained as well.
-
In paragraph one, the average young girl learns to “weave firm square balls”, “play group games”, “sing songs”, break open a coconut, and other activities. These are not necessarily household duties (playing games and singing songs) so A is incorrect. These are also not rudimentary physical skills (singing songs) so B is wrong. C is also incorrect because not all of these tasks are important responsibilities (singing songs). D is correct because these are useful social skills for the girls to learn to play with each other and interact. E is incorrect because these are not monotonous tasks (breaking open coconuts and weaving square balls are certainly not monotonous).
-
From reading this whole passage, we see that domestic handicrafts such as breaking open a coconut and weaving square balls are important, that there is a well-defined social structure where girls take care of children and the boys learn to hunt, fishing skills are important for the boys to learn in this society, but there is no formal education for either (besides child-caring and hunting). There is a clear division of labor between boys and girls as well, so the answer here is D (formal education).
-
From this passage, if there is a point that the girls cooperate with one another and not remain individual, that would weaken the author’s point in line 39. The best answer is D, (I and II only) since group games played by the younger girls involving cooperation and girls learning from watching the boys cooperating would show that the girls do learn cooperation. III is not a good choice because though these girls may learn cooperation with their mothers, this doesn’t prove that they learn cooperation with other young girls.
Hopefully this has helped clear up some confusion - let me know if you have specific questions!
@Apoc314 thank you so much for your response and analysis, it was greatly appreciated. i have a few questions. when you took the psats and got a 203, were you just naturally smart and gifted or did you study beforehand? if you did study, could you recommend me anything to achieve that score like you did? should i just open my book and flip to the practice tests and just keep doing them rotationally, whilst looking at the answers and explanations, or should i do something else?
Hey, I found this post to be very informative, but I still have one question. You say to take 1 or 2 sections a night, but, doing this, I would very quickly exhaust all of my bluebook resources, so how did you do it?
Hi @Entheogen ,
I initially used Kaplan and Princeton Review as my resources and planned out my studying with the blue book to almost perfectly be used up close to the actual test date. This will depend on your time until your test - I’m sure you’ll be able to do well on the SAT with this structure. Let me know if you have any extra questions! Hope this helps!
Hi @kaleido !
I did not study beforehand when I took the PSAT as a sophomore and scored a 203. I have had a natural aptitude for math but was weaker with my critical reading and writing sections back then. Through studying as I’ve written in my story in the first post, I was able to raise my SAT score to 2360 and my PSAT score to 231 in October of Junior Year of High School. I recommend continuing to do the practice tests rotationally and really learning to understand the answers, questions, and explanations.
One thing that helps me is to not only read the explanation, but to put the explanation in my own words to help me fully understand the answer and why I answered the question incorrectly or correctly. Let me know if you have further questions, and sorry about responding back so late! Have a great day!
@apoc314 Thanks for all the advice. My CR went from 670 to 740. I feel like I made a few careless mistakes that kept me from getting a 770-780, like thinking patronizing meant looking down upon instead of being loyal to in a business manner (The context of the sentence even had to do with loyalty, so I don’t even know why I didn’t see that), but I am satisfied, and this was the last SAT I could take.
@Cosmological , good to hear that you were able to score well on the CR section! Congratulations!
@Apoc314
I have studied your guide. I will be sitting for the May 2015 Sat. So far,CR is my weakest province. My problem is with the passages. I found your guide after finishing the practice tests of Blue Book. For now, I am using the Psat official tests for passages and my score is around 680-700 in those tests. So,are they lucid indicators of my sat CR score?
@Nilesh99 , what exactly seems to be the biggest issues you have with the passages? Is it a timing thing with reading them, trying to figure out how to mark them up, or how to analyze them for the answers to the questions? The official PSAT tests should be fairly accurate for indicating your score, but the official SAT tests will probably be the most accurate indicators of your SAT CR score. Please let me know more about your questions with the critical reading section, and I will do my best to help you. Thanks!
When solving passages, especially the long ones, I usually get 2 questions wrong, no matter how much I try to do them correctly by understanding the context. Sometimes I make errors on medium questions and sometimes on hard ones. Timing is probably not an issue, as I finish the reading section in 25 mins.
Ok, @Nilesh99. What kind of questions do you typically get wrong? Do you have example passages and questions that tend to give you trouble? If they are certain types of questions (theme ones, detail ones, etc.) I may help pinpoint some of the errors that are common so you will be able to overcome them and answer them all correctly. If you have any questions and passages that have given you trouble, please post them on here so I may help explain the incorrect and correct answers and hopefully help your understanding of the CR section. Hope this helps!
Can you please provide me with your email address? Then I attach the file and send it to you?
My email address is: destinyvictoryX42S@gmail.com