SO MANY PASSAGE TYPES, SO LITTLE TIME
The reading passages on the old SAT used to be about anything at all, as long as
it was boring and harmless. There could be a passage about a person who knitted
mittens from the lint in his navel. There could be a passage about pastries.
Now the reading passages are much more “academic.” They are examples of
the kinds of things you will read in college—science, history, social science,
literature. And what is the Serpent looking for when selecting a passage? You
guessed it: evidence. The passages are heavy with bits of evidence that support
an argument. There wasn’t much evidence in the breezy passages about lint
mittens. But scientific and historical arguments are often presentations of
evidence and a claim about how the evidence should best be interpreted.
So don’t spend a lot of time asking yourself, “How does this passage make
me feel?” or “What’s my opinion about this passage?” The SAT isn’t at all
concerned with your feelings or opinions. It wants to know whether you can find
the evidence and understand how the author uses evidence to support her
argument.
SCIENCE PASSAGES
For the scientific passages, the College Board selects articles written for a wide
audience. The passages assume no prior knowledge of the particular topic, but
they do use alarming words like vulcanization and flagellates and employ the
kind of thinking that comes from having studied high school science and read
good prose about science. The New York Times, Discover, Wired, Science, and
New Scientist all feature articles of this type.
You don’t have to be a science whiz to handle the science
passages. You just need to pay attention.A few questions, we’re sorry to say, might test your ability to think
scientifically. You may need to understand and evaluate the scientist’s hypothesis
and methods of experimentation, and make sense of data to identify what
conclusions can and cannot be validly drawn from an experiment. The passage
might cite other related experiments by different scientists, and you might be
asked whether the findings of the different researchers support or contradict one
another.
How to handle: Do not be intimidated by scientific jargon. The scientific
passage will inevitably have some far-out scientific terms that you have never
heard of. Don’t worry. You don’t need to know these terms. They will either be