Quizzes, exams, and flashcards about Algebra and Advanced Math: PSAT Algebra — setting it up and reading it back.
← PSAT/NMSQT
Two of the four Math domains, and the two that dominate the section. If revision time has to be rationed, it belongs here.
Algebra is linear: equations and inequalities in one and two variables, linear functions, and systems of two equations in two variables. The questions are rarely hard as algebra; the work is usually in turning a described situation into an equation, and a large share of Math questions are set in a real-world, science or social-studies context that has to be read first.
Advanced Math is everything nonlinear, plus the manipulation that makes it tractable: equivalent expressions, quadratics, exponential growth and decay, polynomials, rational and radical equations, and nonlinear functions. Factoring, completing the square, and knowing which form of a quadratic shows which feature — roots, vertex, intercept — are the recurring moves.
A calculator is allowed on the whole Math section, which tells you where the marks are not: almost never in the arithmetic.
Ten questions across both domains, pitched at the PSAT rather than the SAT: setting up and solving linear equations from a described situation, systems, linear functions and what their slope and intercept mean in the context given, equivalent expressions, quadratics in more than one form, and exponential change.
Every distractor is a named mistake — a sign lost in distribution, a rate read as a total, the vertex read off the wrong form, an exponential treated as linear — and each explanation says which mistake produces which wrong answer.
Two things the real section has that these do not. About a quarter of real Math questions are student-produced response: you type the answer, with no options to work backwards from. And some questions carry a figure or a graph. Both are worth practising in College Board's own materials.
