April 8, 2012

Five Favorite Tricks

A guide to the multiple choice writing questions dealing with grammar. 



1. “Danglers”
 Phrases or pronouns that are not clearly connected to a noun
§  Bob found his watch walking to the bathroom. (It’s unclear whether Bob or the watch was walking to the bathroom. You have to fix that.)
§  In an emergency I am amazed how calm Juanita can be. (It’s unclear whether Juanita is or the speaker is amazed “in an emergency.”)
§  Roger told Patrick he would be the goalie. (It’s unclear who will be goalie.)

2. Incorrect pronouns
§  Don’t use a plural pronoun with a singular subject
§  Don’t use a subject when the pronoun is the object of a verb or preposition. (“Than” is not a preposition. Use subject pronouns with it)
§  Interrogative pronouns: “What” goes with things, “who” with persons, “when” with time, “where” with place, and “why” with reason

3. Subject-verb agreement
If the subject is singular, the verb must be singular. The same with plural.  To fool you:
§  The test-makers put a lot of words between the subject and the verb
§  The use a singular collective noun with its plural definition (e.g. “The herd of cows”)
Remember any subject connected by “and” or “or” is plural. “Either . . . or” and “Neither . . . nor” constructions are singular.

4. Verb tenses
 If actions in a sentence took place at different times, the verbs must reflect that.
 For example: “We had eaten the entire pie by the time Ellen realized it was missing.”
The pie was all gone before Ellen knew it was gone.

5. Parallelism
Any time there is a list, or a comparison, the items should be in the same grammatical form. If one is a noun, they should all (or both) be nouns. If one is an infinitive they should all (or both) be infinitives. Same for adjectives, gerunds, participles, prepositional phrases, verb phrases.

THESE ARE FAR FROM THEIR ONLY TRICKS! There are many others such as using a word which is almost like the right one, using an adjective in place of an adverb, having sentences without a subject, sentences that should be separated, and things that are just bad style. In any event, follow these steps:

1. Read the sentence slowly . . . “aloud” inside your head . . . several times, if necessary.
2. Listen for the “error.”
3. If you detect it, look for it in the answers.
4. If you don’t, analyze the choices. (Or consider moving on. Get to all the easy ones.)
5. If you can get the choices down to two, guess. Go with your first impulse.

On-Line SAT Resources

And it´s all Free!

Compiled by Rebecca Battistoni



On-line SAT Practice Materials
(Compiled by Rebecca Battistoni)

TO GET FREE PRACTICE MATERIALS:


This gives an outline of 8 weeks that could be a good guide for lesson planning!  Just click on the orange link; it's free!

This gives free SAT practice materials from the college board; students will need to use a computer to access the practice tests.  

This is a company that's trying to sell prep materials but they also have some free things; might be useful

This looks interesting!  It was started by a Harvard graduate to "level the playing field" for underprivileged students; needs a log in

Scroll down to the middle section and you will find a lot of resources to click on and also a good section the explains the scoring of the SAT and answers to other frequently asked questions; looks useful!

Great blog with a ton of help for the Writing portion of the test; look at the right hand side of the blog for sample essays questions and test study guides

And one more that looks good; needs a log in, though, to use it

Vocabulary List

1. Furtive
2. Hypocrite
3. Impudent
4. Levity
5. Malevolent
6. Abandon
7. Balk
8. Cogent
9. Colloquial
10. Discrete
11. Nefarious
12. Obdurate
13. Olfactory
14. Oust
15. Penchant
16. Malaise
17. Milieu
18. Provincial
19. Repose
20. Revile
21. Resilient
22. Refute
23. Salient
24. Secular
25. Superfluous
26. Adept
26. Anomaly

27. Appropriate
28. Beget
29. Berate
30. Blatant
31. Catalyst
32. Caustic
33. Cede
34. Complacent
35. Concord
36. Elegy
37. Emulate
38. Expound
39. Extrinsic
40. Exponent
41. Extrapolation
42. Fallacious
43. Flippant
44. Forego
45. Fortitude
46. Frenetic
47. Gregarious
48. Heretical
49. Hegemony
50. Hiatus
51. Impassive

52. Insolent
53. Ironic
54. Lexicon
55. Lax
56. Limber
57. Macabre
58. Macrocosm
59. Malapropism
60. Masochist
61. Mawkish
62. Mellifluous
63. Morose
64. Nebulous
65. Nihilism
66. Nomenclature
67. Non Sequitur
68. Novel
69. Ornate
70. Plausible 

SAT Prep Course Syllabus

Note: Classes meet Monday through Thursday (unless indicated to the contrary) for one-half hourduring Flex. After Spring Break all students taking Critical Reading and Writing should report to Mr. Brody's classroom promptly.


PART I -- CRITICAL READING

Unit 1 – (Feb. 6-16) Introduction, sentence completions, essay
Class 1 – (Feb. 6 and 13) -- Introduction to the SAT, and explanation of “Sentence Completions
Class 2 -- (Feb. 7 and 14) -- Sentence Completions Practice Sets 1 and 2
Class 3 – (Feb. 8 and 15) Drill on sentence completions, Practice Sets 3 and 4, introduction to essay
Class 4 – (Feb. 9 and 16) First Practice Essay

Unit 2 – (Feb. 27-March 8) Reading Short Passages, second essay
Class 5 – (Feb. 27 and March 5) Introduction to Reading Comprehension
Class 6 – (Feb. 28 and March 6)   Short Reading Passages (Practice Sets 1 and 2)
Class 7 – (Feb. 29 and March 7) Short Reading Passages (Practice Sets 3-4), essay preparation
Class 8 – (March 1 and March 8) Second Practice Essay

Unit 3 – (March 12-March 22) Reading Long Passages, practice test
Class 9 – (March 12 and 19) Long Reading Passages (Practice Sets 1 and 2)
Class 10 – (March 13 and 20) Long Reading Passages (Practice Sets 3 and 4, and difficult passages)
Class 11 – (March 14 and 21) Critical Reading Practice Test
Class 12 – (March 15 and 22) Third Practice Essay

PART II WRITING

Unit 4 – (April 9-19) Grammar Review, Improving Sentences, Identifying Sentence Errors, essay
Class 13 – (April 9 and 16), Grammar Review (Favorite Tricks) 
Class 14 – (April 10 and 17) Practice on Improving Sentences and Identifying Sentence Errors)
Class 15 – (April 11 and 15) Improving Paragraphs, More Practice on Improving Sentences and
     Identifying Sentence Errors
Class 16 – Fourth Practice Essay

Unit 5 – (April 23-26) Completion of Writing Multiple Choice
Class 17 – (April 23 and 25) Practice Test on Writing Multiple Choice Questions
Class 18 – (April 24 and 26) Review of Critical Reading and Writing   

Friday, April 27 – SAT Prep (Practice) Test (8:00-Noon)

PART III – ANALYSIS AND REVIEW

Unit 6 – (April 30-May 2-4; May 1 is a holiday) Review
Class 19 – (April 30 and May 3) Individual Analysis of Prep Test Results; Preparation of Final
      Review   Plan
Class 20 -- (Tuesday, May 2 and Friday, May 4) Final Review

Saturday, May 5 -- SAT (7:45 to noon)

A check list for Test Day

 *  Be there by 7:45.    
2.      * Your admission ticket
3.       * Photo ID (carnet, driver’s license, passport)
4.       * .Several soft lead pencils and soft erasers
5.       * Acceptable calculator
6.       *A watch (without alarm)
7.       * A snack that will fit in your desk
(And don’t forget – a good night’s sleep, and an winning attitude.) 


DO NOT bring a cell phone or other electronic device (dictionary, etc.)

101 Great Books Recommended for College-Bound Readers



Author
Title
--
Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua
Things Fall Apart
Agee, James
A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane
Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James
Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel
Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul
The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte
Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily
Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert
The Stranger
Cather, Willa
Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey
The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton
The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate
The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph
Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore
The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen
The Red Badge of Courage
Dante
Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel
Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel
Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles
A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore
An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre
The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George
The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph
Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Selected Essays
Faulkner, William
As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William
The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry
Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave
Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox
The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
Faust
Golding, William
Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph
Catch-22
   Hemingway, Ernest
                           A Farewell to Arms
Homer
The Iliad
Homer
The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous
Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik
A Doll's House
James, Henry
The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry
The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz
The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong
The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper
To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair
Babbitt
London, Jack
The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas
The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel GarcĂ­a
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman
Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman
Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur
The Crucible
Morrison, Toni
Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene
Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George
Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris
Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia
The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan
Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel
Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas
The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria
All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond
Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry
Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D.
The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William
Hamlet
Shakespeare, William
Macbeth
Shakespeare, William
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William
Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard
Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary
Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon
Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles
Antigone
Sophocles
Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John
The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan
Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William
Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David
Walden
Tolstoy, Leo
War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan
Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire
Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr.
Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice
The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith
The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora
Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt
Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee
The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia
To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard
Native Son