<p>I'm preparing for the December 6th SAT with the blue book and I've been scoring in the low 700s in Critical Reading sections. However, this score tends to lower when one of the passages is a fictional tale about romance and such. Normally, the ones about growing up, learning moral lessons, and things like that are easy since the overall main idea and the character development is obvious.
However, take for instance Section 9 of Practice Test #5 in the blue book, the passage is one about a romance. I missed ALMOST half of the passage question because the story just made no sense to me. Normally, I'll miss 0-3 on passages, depending on the number of questions.
I REALLY need help on how to approach these types of passages. Every time I look at a question, I predict an answer, and it turns out my answer was FAR too superficial and the actual answer has a much deeper meaning that I couldn't possibly try to catch by rereading again. </p>
<p>Does anyone have a special way to attack these passages? As of now, I'm using Noitaraperp's method. </p>
<p>What really increased my score was reading the crappy Victorian literature (for class). I’m dead serious. It was miserable, but it did bring up my score considerably. We’re talking lower 600s to mid 700s here. It also helps with the vocabulary section… since they really like big words. Before reading “Tea in a Teale Dress” by Thomas C. Wimbleshire, I thought “halcyon” was a bird.</p>
<p>EDIT: wait, I guess it actually is a bird. How about that.</p>
<p>If it’s too late and this is your last SAT, I’m sorry :/. It’s probably to late too make it through Tess of the D’urbervilles</p>
<p>It’s fine XD. I’m taking the December one this Saturday, but am probably going to read a lot of books and memorize vocab for the January or March one…</p>
<p>Spend a significant amount of time on each old fiction passage you can find. For example, keep rereading the fiction passage in Sample Test 5 until you fully understand each answer. If necessary, spend up to half an hour on each question until you really understand it. If you do that for a few fiction sections, you’ll start to figure it out (my confidence is based on how you’ve figured out the other passage types).</p>
<p>You can’t bogged down on CR sections at the moment; the test is tomorrow and getting as many points possible matters. If you’re still struggling then work on the areas that you know you can handle and get the most points out of it. Like, I’m also struggling in the reading but I’m not going to worry about it when I should be looking at concepts, in which I will get right answers; and look for ways to raise your score up. </p>
<p>^Agreed. My advice only applies when you have more than a day to implement it.</p>