The Critical Reading Practice Thread

Test Preparation SAT Preparation
21
  1. Purpose: to raise awareness of false confessions and to call into question the reliability of eyewitness testimony in the absence of other proofs.
    Tone: saddened by and indignant about the cases of false confessions in the past (or pretended to), a bit manipulative to gain sympathy for the writer’s cause from the readers.
  2. Kinds of evidence:
  • Past cases of false confessions.
  • The surprising results of experiments on false confessions and the reliability of memories.
  • Quotes from psychologists on the connection between social pressure and false confessions.
  • Quotes from evolutionary theorists.
  1. Malleability: the characteristic of being easily changed, either by internal factors or outside manipulations. (I think.)
  2. Yes. Why I think he agrees:
  • The overall tone of the previous paragraphs.
  • “further evidence for”, “already compelling enough”.
  • The paragraph, as well as the whole article in general, only talks about one side of the story: the unreliability of eyewitness testimony and human memories when, in fact, there’s a very real other side of it: with other proofs, most of the time, eyewitness testimonies are usually good enough.
    PS: Great article. I just read a fanfic that talks about the malleability of memories last month and it was kind of scary and meta. The fanfic didn’t just create a scenario where the abused character’s very traumatic incident got brainwashed by the abuser himself many years later into something not traumatic and even loving. It subtly did the same to the readers as well! Believe it or not, I actually vomit after reading that fic.
22

@intero let me first answer your questions (as well as I can) and then I will get to your post @synonyms.

So first of all, there are different methods for reading the passages and more than anything else on the SAT I think this varies from person to person. Some people just do better by marking all the line references first and just going to those parts of the passage.

That said, I personally don’t think that is a great method for scoring really high. That might be a good system for someone who is at a lower level and who reads very slowly, but I am a firm believer in reading the whole passage and reading it pretty well. But just to be clear, getting into the high 700’s as you suggested you are looking to do is really, really difficult. You need to be almost perfect on the vocab and pretty perfect on RC too. So that is an extremely lofty goal. I think even 700 on CR is an amazing score and will impress most colleges.

Now on your question of “How exactly do I go about just focusing the important details and ignoring the rest?”…that is part of what this thread is about. First of all, the “details” are not really what you want to focus on. Its important to know WHY they are there but not important to remember WHAT they say. In fact the more you try to remember the details as you read them the less you will be able to keep the big picture in focus. It is not easy to explain all of the nuances of how to do this, but if you look at the first article that I posted in this thread, one of the questions asked about the purpose of a paragraph and asked if you could predict what that paragraph was going to be about without reading the whole paragraph? You could indeed based on the author’s overall purpose, the topic of the previous paragraph, and the first sentence of that paragraph (that said something like, “I read on.”). It doesn’t mean that you should skip that paragraph, but you could read it very quickly with a focus on why the information was there and not get drawn into trying to remember all of the details.

Hope that helps.

23

Now, on to @synonyms. Thanks for posting your response and again, great job!!! Man, if you saw how I write in one of my non-native languages you would be appalled. It would look like a 3 year old writing. Again, you are obviously a very good reader and you analysis of the passage is pretty spot on.

Let me just add a couple of things.

First of all, regarding question #3, vocab-in-context questions on the SAT usually provide more concrete contextual clues than do this passage. So its hard to land on an exact understanding of malleability just based on the passage, but there are a few clues. Obviously the author has a negative view of memory and since the author says, “evidence of the inaccuracy and malleability of human memory” we can infer for sure that it is negative like inaccuracy and also that it can’t mean inaccuracy exactly since that would be redundant. The other clue is that the author says that the evidence has compelled some state supreme courts to view eyewitness testimony as “inherently unreliable.” So we know that the inaccuracy and malleability of memory makes testimony that is based on it “unreliable.” Malleable means shapeable or bendable (in the way that a soft metal can be shaped or bent) so although you probably couldn’t arrive at that exactly based on the context, you can get somewhere close to that.

Lastly I want to comment on question #4, because I think this raises an important issue that most people are unaware of (although @synonyms you correctly referred to it in your analysis). If a passage presents other people’s views and says nothing to contradict them, we have to infer that the author probably agrees. In other words, sometimes a passage will be very neutral and the author will generally just be presenting some information or even the views of another expert. If the author doesn’t suggest that he disagrees then just by virtue of the fact that he is presenting the information unopposed allows us to infer that he agrees with that information. If he didn’t, he would have to say so.

So in the last paragraph of this article, the author really does go a bit further and begins to indict memory more generally. Even though the author never says that he agrees with the experts that he is quoting in the paragraph, it is safe to infer that he does agree, because why else would he give their opinions without saying anything to oppose them?

Thanks again @synonyms for posting your analysis!

24

There’s a Twitter account - @satdailyreading that posts links to SAT-level articles everyday. Thought it might help :slight_smile:

25

@imlikeabird Thanks for the link.

26

It is @satreadingdaily*. @imlikeabird2‌

27

Another really good source for articles (I personally use it to help find articles for this thread) is Arts and Letters Daily. It gives little snippets or articles and then links to where they can be found. This way you can choose an article that interests you. The level of difficulty of most of the articles is pretty close to that of passages on the SAT (although some of the articles can be very difficult).

Will try to get another article posted with questions in the next day or so…

28

Below is the link for the next article. I tried to pick what I thought was a slightly harder one this time (although that is really very subjective). However, it is also a pretty short article so hopefully that will induce some people to read it and try to answer the questions. I also think it is a very interesting piece (about Lewis Carroll and allegations that he was a pedophile). Have a look!!!

http://www.historytoday.com/fern-riddell/curiouser-and-curiouser-case-lewis-carroll

  1. What is the author’s purpose in the passage?

  2. What can we infer about the opinion that Karoline Leach and Jenny Wolf have of Carroll’s relationship with children?

  3. What does the author imply in her statement about Professor Robert Douglas-Fairhurst?

  4. In context, what does the expression “shoe-horning” (in the first sentence of the second-to-last paragraph) most probably mean?

  5. In context, what does the word “scant” (last sentence of the article) mean?

  6. What is the author implying by saying (in the last paragraph) that, “Popular culture is dangerously good at historical myth making”?

Hope you enjoy the article and hope to see some responses!

29
  1. Purpose: To debunk the image of Lewis Carroll’s paedophilia painted by the popular culture.
  2. They think that Carroll was innocent and was only accused of paedophilia in the first place because of the biographers’ attempt to make him not appear to be paedophilic.
  3. Eh, I’m not sure about this one, but I think that she was implying that he was lying. Well, it’s either that or the program makers didn’t listen to him.
  4. From what I can gleam from the passage, shoe-horning is like forcing something into a preconceived mould. Like, Carroll wasn’t a paedo bear but popular culture kept portraying him as one simply because it would more shocking and interesting that way.
  5. Scant: little, not much.
  6. By chasing after the shocking headlines, popular culture has, well, shoe-horned history into myths, into untrue things. Long story short, it’s lying to viewers to gain more views. Sometimes, the lies are so good that it believes its own lies as well. Thus, the myth continues.

Well, that was really, really, really hard. It took me 30 minutes to answer all of the questions, and I had to re-read the paragraphs constantly as well.
Also, maybe next time, you can make some of questions multiple-choice? Usually, when I first read a passage, I get the gist of the idea and make the right choice immediately without looking at the other answers. Whenever I read the other answers, though, I start to doubt myself and switch to the wrong choice. I just did a critical reading test in the SAT CR workbook, and out of the 7 reading comprehension mistakes that I made, all 7 of them were because I changed my mind. Conclusion: I suck at multiple-choice questions. Do you have any idea how can I fix this bad habit of mine?
Plus, multiple-choice questions will surely gain more responses.

30

I will post a longer reply later but just wanted to comment because it relates to the other cr question that you posted about that I don’t think you should read too much into your performance on non-official material. I know that wasn’t the point, but I think it is very hard to judge when the questions aren’t real questions (which is part of why I am reluctant to include them). More later…

31

Sorry for the delay here….

Ok so again this was a really, really good job of reading the passage and answering the questions. Let me first make some comments about the questions and then I will get to the issues that you raised after.

Question 2 is a really, really hard question because there are multiple viewpoints being expressed there and you have to really read it carefully to answer the question. But you nailed it. One thing that could help a little is that Jenny Woolf is mentioned again later in the passage so that may help in understanding on which side of the issue she stands (as you indicated, she does not seem to think that he was a pedophile).

Question 3 is another really hard one that I want to comment on. A key skill on the SAT RC is being able to draw proper inferences (the correct answers) from the evidence given (the passages). A proper inference is something that we can say almost certainly must be true where as an improper inference (and therefore wrong answer) is something that perhaps could be true but is not supported by any evidence. Now in this case, we don’t have a lot to go on, but I don’t think we can say that he was lying. Again, he COULD have lied, but we don’t really have any support to go quite that far. If you think about it the passage in general and that paragraph specifically is accusing the filmmakers of ignoring evidence that would contradict their point of view or only presenting the evidence that would seem to support it. So a safer inference here is that the second thing you wrote: that they didn’t listen to him. Really the author seems to be implying that it is unlikely that the Professor would not have brought Woolf’s research to the filmmakers attention so we are left to infer that the filmmakers chose not to mention or include that information in the film (presumably because it didn’t mesh with their portrayal of Carroll.

Question 4: Yeah shoe-horning is basically forcing something into a place where it doesn’t exactly fit (it helps a lot to be able to picture an actual shoe-horn and what it does). But I think the context allows you to get that sense even if you weren’t sure what a shoe-horn is.

One final comment that I would make that relates to your answer to both this question and question 1 is that although the author does generalize to talk about how popular culture causes history to be read inaccurately (for the sake of getting more viewers or more interest in the topic), she is really taking more specific aim at the producers of this documentary. Again, she jumps off from that point to make some more general observations about the influence of popular culture, but the passage is really more about the case of Louis Carroll and how he is depicted in the documentary.

Let me address the issues that you raised at the end of your post in another post because I have to run right now and want to get this reply posted……

32

Ok so to the other questions you raised, @synonyms, I went with a really hard passage here in part because I wasn’t getting any indication that the ones I did before were challenging to you or anyone else, so I thought I would dial it up a notch. But yeah this was a tough one and the questions I asked were tough too, so I will probably dial it down a bit for the next one.

On the multiple choice issues that you described and your suggestions for this thread, the issues are actually related so let me explain. First of all, I think that how you read the passages and how you answer the questions are obviously related, but there is sort of a separate skill to answering questions that is independent of how you read the passages. What I am really trying to address here is how to read the passages, and it does seem like you are doing that very well.

Without going into too much detail about the process of answering the questions, let me mention a few things. First of all there is something that I call The Principle of No Ambiguity. It means that there can be only one right answer and that the other 4 answers must be wrong for one reason or another. So when you say that you know the right answer at first but then change your mind when you look at the other answers, in theory this should not happen. That is because in order to confidently select the right answer you also have to have reason to say that the other 4 answers are wrong. It is black and white and not ambiguous.

Now, 2 things to this point. One is that you are not using official SAT questions so that may be the problem. Often these questions ARE ambiguous so the theory above does not always work. That might be the problem and that is one reason why it is important to try to use official materials. It might be that the wrong answers could in fact be right and that it is not as black and white as it should be and that this is the reason you are getting them wrong.

Assuming the questions are “perfect” questions, then the other thing I would point out is that the right answer must be supported by the passage. Wrong answers won’t always be outright contradicted by the passage, but they won’t be supported by the passage either. On that other passage that you had trouble with (about the West and films about the West) the answer that you selected was just too broad and not supported by the passage. So often the wrong answer could be true outside of the context of the passage, but if it is not supported by the passage then it will not be right.

In the Lewis Carroll passage, the inference that the professor was lying would probably be too strong for a right answer on the SAT. There just isn’t anything in the passage to support it. Now, does that mean that he wasn’t lying? No!!! Maybe he was. Maybe he deceived the filmmakers or left information out. But there really isn’t anything in the passage that would suggest that so that could not be the right answer on the SAT.

On the issue of me adding answer choices to my questions, there are a few issues related to the above. One is that I might not write “perfect” questions and obviously that would taint the exercise. Second is that I intended this to be about how to read critically and not how to answer multiple choice questions (which again is a different skill) so that is the other major hesitation. Finally, I just don’t know if I have the time :smile: But I do want people to participate in this and learn from it so maybe I will do it or at least try to do it and see what happens.

33

@reasonsat Dialling it down a bit would help a lot. I get nervous easily, and after that practice test of that book, my confidence has been quite shaky. Passage Reading and Math were supposed to be my trump card, you see.
Maybe I should start with one or two Blue Book tests before going over the unofficial books. I was intending to save the official practice tests for later and do the unofficial ones for strategies in the mean time because I still have, like, half of Direct Hits 2 and 90% of Direct Hits 1 to study…
Duly noted about the context. I should really stop over-analysing things and start to think literal.
Thanks for the tips.

34

Yes, you cannot be interpretive. Then everyone would come to a different answer and there would be no objectively correct answer.

On the materials you are using, I would use the 3rd party resources to teach you strategy (and for CR I would use Meltzer’s book), but when it comes to practicing passages try to use official stuff. A couple of suggestions…

First, there are a few additional released tests floating around out there so you have an additional 3 or 4 tests beyond the BB.

Second, another good often untapped resource is the SAT Online Course. The course itself is not very good in my opinion, but it comes with 9 tests!!! So that will give you lots of additional passages and sections to work with. I would use those tests and BB tests 4-10 for informal practice and then save BB tests 1-3 and the additional ones that are available online for full length practice tests since the latter ones were previously administered and will therefore be a tad more airtight and will also have an accurate scoring scale.