Primary Purpose Questions

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2. Primary Purpose Questions

Your SAT reading comp sections will include a few questions that look something like this:

The primary purpose of this passage is to … Or this:

The authors overall tone could best be described as …

And in order pick the right answers for these big-picture questions, you need to zoom out. There are a lot of details in SAT reading passages, of course, and not being clear on which are the more important ones can really throw you off. There will be a couple of wrong answers, which focus too closely on specific details in the passage that just aren’t universal enough in scope.

It’s pretty easy to get tricked by answer choices like that unless you have a method.

Sketching the big picture

If you take one thing away from this post, it should be this: take notes about the big picture while you read.

Besides keeping you focused, notes also help by giving you a zoomed out picture. You’re only going to put the most important details and how they relate to each other in your notes — thinking about their function in the overall passage — so when you look at those, later, you’re not going to get distracted by the little details.

Why zooming out is important

Imagine I have a picture of a river. I took the picture while sitting on the bank, skipping stones and eating a sandwich. What’s in the picture? Water, trees, rocks, sky, moss, bugs … lots of stuff. Then I ask you what shape the river is. Is it curvy? Straight? While you might see a curve in the picture, you’d have a pretty hard time sketching its overall shape. Any one little section of an SAT reading passage is like that. Even if I gave you a whole bunch of pictures, it’d be pretty hard to decide, just like using the whole text without notes would be.

You don’t want that; you want a satellite image to see the river’s shape. Sure, it won’t show the bugs, the rocks, or my sandwich, but it’ll show the big picture. And that’s what the question was asking for.

Making sure you’re ready for the main point

Taking the right kind of margin-notes on your SAT is a skill that takes practice. You have to remember to ask yourself those questions for staying focused: “What’s the main idea of this paragraph?” “How does this paragraph relate to the next one?”

Practice that, and these big-picture questions will be a cinch.

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3. ‘Line Number’ Vocabulary Words Questions

For the next two questions from the following SAT reading passage, we have a question type called Vocabulary in Context. This question type is one of the easiest to improve on, mainly because many students approach this question incorrectly.

What happened in between those two photographs is that I experienced, and then overcame, what the poet Meena Alexander has called “the shock of arrival.” When I was deposited at the wrought-iron gates of my residential college as a freshman, I felt more like an outsider than I’d thought possible. It wasn’t just that I was a small Chinese boy standing at a grand WASP temple; nor simply that I was a hayseed neophyte puzzled by the refinements of college style.

It was both: color and class were all twisted together in a double helix of felt inadequacy.

Let’s try this first question below:

As used in line xx, “deposited” most nearly means placed into

dropped off disengaged entrusted invested

Many look at the word “deposited” and then look straight at the answer choices. DO NOT DO THIS.

The question is all about context, which means the words around the word in question. So you must go back to the passage and find the word. Here I’ve excerpted the relevant part of the passage:

When I was deposited at the wrought-iron gates of my residential college as a freshman, I felt more like an outsider than I’d thought possible

Next, put your own word in place of the word in quotation marks. That’s right – ignore “deposited”

and come up with your own word. Then, match that word with the answer choices.

Here we can come up with dropped off – that is, his parents dropped him off in front of the school.

Now let’s take a look at another vocabulary-in-context. Let me also point out that typically you will not get more than one vocabulary-in-context question per medium-length passage. This question is also a little harder – give it a shot!

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Here is the relevant part of the passage:

I have on the wrong shoes, the wrong socks, the wrong checkered shirt tucked the wrong way into the wrong slacks. I look like what I was: a boy sprung from a middlebrow burg who affected a secondhand preppiness.

As used in line xx, “affected” most nearly means reacted

had an effect on

give forth the impression of approached cautiously appropriated

Here the author looks preppy in a second-hand way. He is trying to give forth the impression that he is preppy (in a cheesy way). Therefore the answer is (C).

Do not be drawn to the answer choice because it reminds you of the most common form of the word. In this case, you may think “affected” matches up with (B). If you look at the context – and place (B) where you see “affected”, the sentence will not make sense.

Again, always make sure to go back to the relevant part of the passage when you are doing a

vocabulary-in-context question. This is one of those situations where SAT vocabulary flashcards will only help so much and if you spend all your time focusing on simply how to remember SAT

vocabulary, you’ll be inclined to jump to all the wrong conclusions.

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