By Patrick Fitz

Spring is the season for the SAT, when many students enroll in SAT Prep classes and commence their educational journey in standardized testing.

The first section students encounter on the SAT exam is the Reading Test. The section consists of 5 passages of text, each about 75-95 lines long. Ten to eleven questions follow, each gauging comprehension of the text, including on vocabulary, structure, purpose, and intent.

Literature Passage

The first passage is always fiction. Historically, College Board had chosen passages from short stories and novels originally written in English in the twentieth century - ordinary material from English literature courses. Lately, however, the Literature passage has proven to be both more recent and more global: sometimes passages are in translation, many have been written in the twenty-first century, and authors now hail from all over the Anglophone world. Students should expect to read a text set virtually anywhere on earth, including in the context of cultures and societies unfamiliar to them.

As with all SAT Reading Test passages, no outside knowledge is required to answer the questions. College Board specifically designs the questions so that each and every one can be answered purely with the information contained in the Literature passage. For this particular passage, only a basic understanding of literary technique is necessary to ace the questions; students would not be well served, during their SAT prep, by trying to memorize obscure rhetorical terms - this is not the AP English Literature or Language exams!

Social Science Passage

At least one passage on the SAT will be what we think of as social science: economics, history, sociology, psychology. It is always a secondary source - written after the events that have taken place - and increasingly resembles Science passages in that this passage will report on trends in understanding, experimental methods, or data analysis, often from industry professionals or consultants.

Additionally, the passage may address topics that verge into data science and mathematics. Again, this does not mean that outside knowledge is necessary in order to correctly answer the questions, rather that students should expect to think critically about epistemology - how we know what we know. Instead of mere accounting of historical facts, the Social Science passage on the SAT is more and more concerned with the acquisition of knowledge in those particular fields.

This passage is likely to have been written in the last ten years, and many Social Science passages on the SAT feature an infographic: a chart, table, or graph that corresponds to explanation and evidence presented in the text.

History Passage

Another type of passage from the SAT Reading Test is often referred to as the History passage. This text is obtained from primary sources - speeches, printed articles, contemporary accounts - and presented in written form on the page. What distinguishes this passage from the others is its age: the History passage is often significantly dated. Students should expect to read English language written or spoken as far back as the American Revolution, up to as recently as the 1960s.

Common topics in the History Passage include American Slavery and Suffrage, as well as twentieth-century politics. As the SAT is an American test, the History passage has traditionally been sourced from US history covered in the American education system; however, this may be changing, as SAT advances its globalized approach. History passages may still be primarily about American history, but topics may be more international in scope.

Another common feature of the History passage is that sometimes it is actually two, what are known as the paired passages: two, shorter texts in dialogue with one another. Students answer questions about the first passage, then the second, and then about the relationship between the two. Moreover, this format may instead be included in a Science passage on the SAT.

Science Passages

The SAT will include at least two Science passages. These could be about virtually anything: genetics, astronomy, archaeology, neuroscience, entomology, chemistry, botany, zoology, climate, physics, cosmology - the list is endless!

These passages are generally about the Scientific Method: how professionals regard topics, formulate hypotheses, design and conduct experiments, and interpret results. Students should, however, note two things: the first is that these passages are accessible to the lay public, meaning that while each contains technical terms and some jargon, the passage is broadly comprehensible to those without domain expertise and had been published originally in some magazine or newspaper; the second is that no outside knowledge is needed to answer the questions, meaning that science-oriented students may have an easier time with these passages but every student is capable of utilizing the text to find the answer to every question on the SAT.

Conclusion

Students have only 65 minutes to answer the 52 questions contained in the Reading Test. This averages out to 13 minutes per passage, though certain students may find certain passages easier than others, and therefore distribute their test-taking time differently.

The upshot of the section is that students should focus on reading the text and searching for every answer within that text: the evidence is there to correctly answer every single question. Those in Dubai or around the world who want to improve their score should not only study diligently for the SAT but also read widely and across genres and time periods outside of ordinary coursework - the best way to read better is to read more!

- Hale Education Group