SAT — cross-text connections

Cross-text questions put two writers on one subject and ask what passes between them. They are among the harder questions on the section, and the reason is almost always the same: the disagreement is rarely a flat contradiction, and a reader expecting one will overshoot. Ten pairs here, each with both passages printed in full, and the relationship between them is different nearly every time.

The most useful of these relationships is the one where the second writer grants the first writer's finding and refuses what the first takes it to show. Digital art sales have risen — the second writer says so in his opening clause — and painting is not thereby obsolete, because the rise belongs to one part of the market and not to another. A reader who registers only that the two disagree will reach for a choice that has the second writer denying the sales figures, which is precisely what he concedes. A second pair works the same way with evidence rather than data: two writers look at the same carvings on the same temple wall, agree entirely about what is carved there, and differ about what kind of vessel it is and therefore what kind of society made it.

Two other shapes recur. One writer offers a different cause for an observation both accept, as when beetles killing a forest turn out, on the second account, to be finishing trees that drought had already weakened — a demotion rather than a refutation, and the wrong answers include denying that the beetles matter at all. And one pair agrees almost entirely and parts at a single word: the steam engine was crucial, says the second writer, but "sole" is doing all the work in the first writer's sentence, and that one word is the whole dispute.

The questions that ask what both writers would accept are the mirror image of this skill, and they are answered by finding the concession inside the disputing sentence. A writer who says a building is brutalist "regardless of the facade's transparency" has conceded the transparency in the act of dismissing it, and that concession is the common ground. Each explanation states what each writer holds in a clause before comparing them, which is the order worth practicing.

Every civilization, study, institution and work in these passages is invented, and no invented finding is attributed to any real organization, journal or university. Nothing is reproduced from any College Board publication, released test, practice test, question bank or scoring guideline.

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• State what each of two writers holds before comparing them
• Recognize a writer who grants a finding and refuses the conclusion drawn from it
• Tell a claim narrowed in scope from a claim denied outright
• Identify a rival cause offered for an observation both writers accept
• Locate a disagreement that turns on a single word such as "sole" or "entirely"
• Find the concession inside a disputing sentence and read it as common ground
• Reject an answer that overstates a partial objection into a total rejection
• Reject an answer that gives the first writer's response where the second writer's was asked for
• Refuse a position attributed to a writer that neither passage contains
• Spot a point of agreement offered as the point of disagreement

Consider these two passages. The first writer: "The invention of the steam engine was the sole catalyst of the Industrial Revolution, since it supplied the power needed to mechanize textile production." The second writer: "The steam engine was certainly crucial, but the Industrial Revolution depended just as much on new financial instruments." On which point would the two writers most likely disagree?