Question 4 . This one is tricky because several of the choices are associated
with the word entrenched. The context is key here. Mandela does not say
that legislation alone created (or “installed”) the poverty and lack of human
dignity experienced by black South Africans. What he means is that laws
have supported (or “reinforced”) traditions of racism. The answer is C. *
*With vocabulary questions, it always helps to plug the answer choices right into the sentence to try them out for fit. Feel free to imaginethe sentence being read aloud by Nelson Mandela for authenticity.
—Samantha
Question 5 . What is Mandela implying when he says that whites in South
Africa are significantly wealthier than Africans and that the government is
doing nothing to fix this? Basically, he is implying that the government
doesn’t care about its African citizens. The correct answer is D because it
best crystallizes the underlying meaning of the paragraph. It might be
tempting to choose C, since Mandela states that the condition of other
countries is “irrelevant” for present purposes. However, he says this to
emphasize the importance of the fact that “we are poor by comparison with
the white people in our own country.”
Question 6 . This question is really just a test of whether you were able to
follow the passage from beginning to end. Choice A is the only one that has
a basis in the text. This portion of a sentence is Mandela’s way of getting
his audience to focus on South Africa and not let other nations influence
the world’s perception of his own.
Question 7 . In the last paragraph, Mandela raises the usual objections made
by the government in order to refute them. While the government might
claim that South Africa is wealthier than other African nations, he restates
his central argument that Africans are poorer than white South Africans
and are denied the same opportunities. The answer is C.
INFOGRAPHICS
As we’ve mentioned, the SAT now includes questions about informational
graphics that accompany the passages on the Reading and Writing Tests. It might
be jarring, at first, to see a bar graph in your reading passage. But really, these
graphs are just more pieces of evidence. What’s more, once you get used to these
infographics, they become some of the easiest questions in the section.