Craft 1 — words in context, purpose and two texts
Thirteen questions in the three shapes this domain uses, and they demand three different kinds of attention.
Seven words in context. A short passage with a blank and four academic words, only one of which does what the sentence needs. Nuanced, systematic, cursory, tenuous, refute, undermine, exacerbate — ordinary academic vocabulary, not obscure words, and the question is never "do you know this word" but "does this word do what this sentence needs done". The sentence always contains the constraint: a contrast with "random" forces systematic; a description of skimming rather than deep work forces cursory; a plan that had the opposite effect forces exacerbate.
The method that works is to predict before you look. Decide from the sentence alone what the blank has to mean, in your own words, and only then read the options. Reading the four first makes all four sound possible, which is exactly what they were chosen to do.
Three on what a sentence is doing. These ask for the function of a piece of text, and the answers are verbs: this sentence concedes, illustrates, qualifies, introduces a complication, blocks an interpretation the reader was about to form. One of them turns on a single word — the passage says "Still", and "still" answers an objection, which means the sentence before it must have raised one. Learning to read connectives as structural signals is most of this question type.
The habit to build: after reading any sentence, be able to say in one verb what it did, not what it was about. That is a skill you can practice on anything you read, and almost nobody does.
Three cross-text pairs. Two short passages on the same topic — standardized testing, electric vehicles, remote work — that agree about most of it and part company on one specific step. The question asks how the second author would respond to a particular claim in the first.
The trap is always the same and it is worth naming: the two texts usually agree about more than they disagree about, so a wrong choice will either take something both authors accept and present it as the dispute, or will have the second author reject the first wholesale when in fact they accept the claim and object to what is drawn from it. Find the sentence in Text 2 that the author of Text 1 could not have written. The answer is about that sentence and nothing else.
Fifteen flashcards cover the vocabulary used in the questions, the three question types of the domain and two of the rhetorical moves the purpose questions name.
- Choose among four words by what the sentence requires, not by what the word usually means
- Predict the meaning a blank needs before reading any option
- Use a connective — however, still, thus, rather than — as the structural signal that decides a question
- Name what a sentence does in one verb: concedes, illustrates, qualifies, blocks an interpretation
- Describe the structure of a whole passage in two or three moves
- Locate the single point on which two authors actually disagree, rather than the topic they share
- Recognize the wrong answer that turns shared ground into a dispute
- Tell a limited objection from a wholesale rejection when predicting how one author would answer another
"The claim that the Antonine Wall was abandoned within a generation of its building rests almost entirely on coins. Coins do not prove occupation, only supply. Still, the pattern is hard to account for any other way." — What is the function of the middle sentence? The word after it is "Still", which answers an objection; so the sentence before must have raised one. The writer concedes that coin finds show what was delivered rather than who lived there, and then defends the conclusion anyway.
Sample question
Consider this passage. "The naked mole rat feels almost nothing from acid or from capsaicin, the compound that makes chilli hot. Its cells lack a working version of a protein other mammals use to signal that kind of damage. This is not a defect. The colonies live in sealed burrows where carbon dioxide builds up to levels that would leave any other rodent in constant discomfort, and an animal that felt that discomfort could not settle to feed." What is the function of the sentence "This is not a defect." in the passage?
- It restates the preceding claim in stronger terms.
- It rejects an interpretation the reader is likely to have formed, and prepares the explanation that follows.
- It introduces a competing theory that the rest of the passage goes on to test.
- It concedes a limitation in the evidence described earlier.
See the answer
It rejects an interpretation the reader is likely to have formed, and prepares the explanation that follows.
Ask what the sentence DOES, not what it says. A reader who has just been told that an animal lacks a working pain protein will read that as something missing — and the sentence blocks that reading, then hands over to the burrow explanation that makes the absence an advantage. So it rejects an interpretation and pivots. It does not restate the preceding claim: the preceding sentence is about a protein, and this one is about how to interpret it. It introduces no competing theory — nothing after it is tested against anything. And it concedes nothing: a concession admits a weakness, and this sentence denies one.
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- SAT — words in context, hard module
- SAT — cross-text connections: paired studies
- SAT — main purpose of a text
- SAT — craft and structure in literature
- SAT — function of a detail or quotation
- SAT — words in context, second set
- Information and Ideas
- Standard English Conventions
- Expression of Ideas
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