Test Crushers Chronicle

Why do we love zero so much? Why is it so important to have a zero sitting opposite a quadratic equation? It's not magic. There's a very important reason!

Dialogue isn't easy to analyze. Because it often contains no direct statements from the author about its meaning, it may feel squishy and subjective. But there's a sure way to identify the purpose of any dialogue.

If you think you're not good at "coming up with interpretations" of texts, you're in luck on the Reading section of the SAT. You don't have to "come up with" anything. In fact, trying to reach for meaning can work against you. The text will give you everything you need. Just let it say what it says and don't worry about having your own ideas.

You probably realize that taking a multiple choice test means having the answer in front of you. To take advantage of that fact, learn how to efficiently check each of the answer choices.

Math problems on the SAT are not about following a step-by-step process (although learning these processes does help). It's more about thinking mathematically. That is, it's about looking at patterns, making observations, and experimenting.

The subject of a sentence is not necessarily what the sentence is "about." To find the subject, you sometimes have to forget the meaning of the words and just look at how they are related to each other. You'll find that everything ultimately depends on one word, the foundation of the whole sentence; that's the subject.

Technically, you can solve every linear equation problem using the same equation form. (And if you have to choose one, go with slope-intercept form; many questions on the SAT math section revolve around the slope and y-intercept). But sometimes, it's a little bit more direct to use point-slope or standard form. So learn those as well, and practice moving from one form to another.

In order to talk about a subject, you have to start talking about it. To open the door to a topic, authors use transitions and topic sentences that let the reader know the context for the details to follow.

When interpreting a point on a graph, keep in mind that every point represents not just a pair of numbers, but a relationship between two values. It stands not for a number but for a fact: the fact that when one thing has a certain value, another thing can have a certain related value. It can be translated into a sentence that has the form, "When..., then..."

Questions on the SAT have to be very specific in what they're asking, so that everyone who reads the question carefully can come to the same understanding. Use that fact to home in on the answer. Every word counts. Every single way in which the question is defined or qualified will correspond to some facet of the answer.

There's nothing wrong with feeling proud of doing things the right way. But because pride focuses on our favorite thing (ourselves!), it can become a distraction from details outside of us. Feel free to pat yourself on the back, but let that be a reminder to double check the details.

Combining sentences is not so much about yoking two of them together as it is about breaking one of them down into parts that can be attached to the other.

Do you find yourself having to learn the same formulas over and over again? To improve your long-term memory of formulas, keep reminding yourself of why each of them works. If you know the "why," the "what" follows easily.

The SAT loves to combine the two grammatical concepts of pronoun number agreement and apostrophe usage. Learn the difference between these similar words and when to use each.

There are two kinds of questions on the SAT that have to do with the number of solutions to an equation. The simpler of these two is about the number of solutions to an equation with one variable in the first degree (that is, not squared or cubed or nthed). In this case, the equations that have zero solutions look very similar to those that have infinite solutions. Be ready to tell the difference!

Don't get bogged down in the minutiae. In order to process an SAT reading passage efficiently, you have to identify what's essential and only pay close attention to the details you actually need. Use transitions to analyze the underlying structure of a passage, and then fit details into that structure as needed.

For problems involving comparison words like "than" or "as," check to see if the comparison is faulty. What is actually being compared? Are they the same kinds of thing? Are they the things the author intended to compare?

The number one may seem very simple and obvious, but it has a lot of tricks up its sleeve. One to watch for is the invisible coefficient. When you see a variable by itself without a coefficient, think of that as having a coefficient of one.

Language isn't just a tossed salad of ideas, facts, and opinions. It has structure, like a sandwich. Use this structure to indicate relationships and create emphasis.

Just because the actual math is easy doesn't mean there are no pitfalls in an SAT math question. Remember that the SAT often sets problems up in a slightly unexpected way, so be sure to read the question carefully and label the units when you write down your equations.

Just being a true statement doesn't make an answer correct. It also has to have the same structure and subject matter as the question itself. A "how" question can't be answered with a location. A "where" can't be answered with a reason. Be sure you understand what the question is asking before you start looking for the answer.

You don't have to use the "right tool for the right job." You can pound a nail in with the grip end of a saw. But wouldn't it be nice if you had a hammer? Learn which of the forms of linear equations works best for which purpose, and you won't waste time transforming equations into a form you don't actually need.

The most harmful lie that we've all been taught about poetic imagery is that interpreting it is a creative activity. We think we're supposed to think about how the images make us feel and what they remind us of. But when an author uses an image, they usually have some very definite purpose in mind, and it may not be the one we immediately think of. The good news is, correct interpretation is a lot less work than "creative" interpretation. All you have to do is keep your own grubby hands off the text and let it tell you what it means.

Exponential functions can be a bit intimidating at first. Practice thinking of growth and decay functions as a process of taking a percentage of a starting quantity, then taking the same percentage of the new quantity, and so on until you've reached the specified number of times.

Combining sentences on the SAT is an exercise in reduction. Your goal is to go from redundancy to efficiency, eliminating unnecessary repetition and turning additional clauses into phrases.

The choices on the math section are designed to include answers that could result from a slight error in setting up the problem at the beginning. But often, you can rule out these answer choices from the beginning by comparing them to the description of the situation.

A conjunction like "and" or "or" can't put together two things that are basically different parts of speech. A noun can only be conjoined with another noun, not a verb or participle or clause. Practice catching these "faulty parallelisms" in your own writing.

Sometimes you're better off not doing the actual math to solve a math problem. Identifying the graph of a parabola is a common case.

The magic of unit conversion comes down to understanding that you can multiply anything by one without changing its value. The fancy footwork lies in finding different ways to express the number one to get the unit or units you want.

You can't answer "why" questions by looking directly at the "what." You have to understand the situation, and see how a thing fits into the story in order to understand its purpose. When asked about the purpose of a sentence, don't just think about its content. Look at how it advances the overall purpose of the text, and how it relates to the text immediately before and after.

Occasionally you can rule out an answer choice by observing that if it were correct, another choice would also have to be correct. In today's episode we'll look at one example.

Questions about how to organize a paragraph can feel squishy and subjective, but there's a very definite, objective technique that works for most cases of this kind of question.

Even if you know exactly how to interpret a graph, you can still lose points by not being careful enough in your reading of it. If you've ever seen an optical illusion, you should know not to depend too much on the accuracy of your unaided eyes. Use an improvised ruler to make sure you're following straight lines to and from the axes.

To find buried treasure without a map, you'd have to dig your spade into every square foot of the desert island. Not a good use of your time! To find information in a passage, you have to think strategically about where you would expect that information to appear.To follow along with today's Test Crushers Chronicle, download the College Board's SAT Practice app, and find the problem for December 11, 2017 (Reading).

You won't have a formula or routine in your back pocket for every type of question that can come up on the SAT. Learning formulas is important, but even more important is knowing how to react when you see something you "don't know" how to do.

Even if you're completely adept at shuffling values and variables around using the arcane rules they taught you in Algebra I, you may still be in the dark about what all these glyphs you're processing actually mean. When you're dealing with equations, practice expanding each term in your mind to say what it really represents.

If there's a back-reference in a sentence (like a pronoun, demonstrative adjective, transition, or even the word "the"), you have know specifically what that back-reference is pointing to in order to have any idea what the sentence is talking about. Ask yourself if you can answer the question, "which one," before you move on.

You do, of course, have to choose one of the four answer choices given on any SAT multiple-choice question. But you aren't necessarily stuck with the way each answer choice is expressed. Sometimes, it's helpful to rewrite some of the answer choices (without changing their underlying value) so that you can more easily compare them to the others.

If two or more of the answer choices on a Writing and Language Use question feel "correct," you may just need to take a broader view. Answer choices that are grammatically correct in themselves may yet not be consistent with the way the rest of the passage is written.

The idea that opposites are somehow alike may seem strange and paradoxical, but the fact is that in order to be opposed, two things do have to be at least on the same spectrum. Hot and cold are both temperatures, sweet and bitter are both flavors, and so on. We can apply this concept when we are trying to set up a contrast in a text by asking what kind of thing each term is, or what it applies to. We rule out anything that doesn't have the same scope as the other term in the contrast.

If you feel like you don't know what you're doing, be open to the possibility that this feeling is lying to you. Try to take the problem apart and see if there are one or more parts of it that you can handle.

The most boring way to look at a textual passage is as a series of ideas: first this one, then that one, then the next one, until you get to the end. What a grind. It's more interesting to watch for and recognize the ways in which each idea picks up the content of the previous ideas and pulls it into new patterns.

It helps on the SAT to be comfortable with parabolas, and I certainly recommend that, before you take the test, you practice identifying the zeros and the coordinates of the vertex of a parabola. But if you draw a blank, all is not lost. Remember that a parabola is just a function in which one value depends on another. So just as you can plug answer choices into an equation to find solutions, you can often work backwards into the solution on parabola problems.

Before you add a sentence to a paragraph on the Writing and Language section, analyze it for clues about what comes before and after the new sentence. The sentence may contain back-references to earlier sentences in the paragraph, or later ones can contain back-references to the new one.

It's not unusual to think that the English sections of the SAT are subjective. It can sometimes feel like you're being expected not so much to read the passages as to read the test-makers' minds. But make no mistake: the logic behind the questions is just as rigorous as the logic of a system of equations.In fact, a system of equations is the perfect metaphor for how to think about each passage you read, on the SAT or elsewhere.​To follow along with today's Test Crushers Chronicle, download the College Board's SAT Practice app, and find the problem for November 14, 2017 (Reading).

You can spend a lot of time trying to absorb all of the information in a word problem on the Math section of the SAT, but if you don't have a way to organize all that information from the beginning, you'll quickly lose track and might get overwhelmed. To cut the information down to the essentials, start at the end. Identify the question, and then as precisely as you can, determine what information you would need in order to answer that question. If that information isn't given to you directly, how will you get it?

One common tip-off (it almost never fails) that answer choice on the writing section is incorrect is that it includes a verb in the passive voice. You should be aware of the few cases in which it's actually better to use the passive voice, but most of the time, you can find a better choice that rephrases the sentence in the active.Listen to find out what any of this has to do with Chuck Norris

Do you have a reliable system for organizing the information in problems that involve converting between different units of measurement (like liters to gallons, or miles/hour to km/minute)? Today we look at how to set up a conversion problem in a way that avoids confusion.