SAT Reading Passage Types Content and Subjects

In this lesson, you'll get some helpful hints for the types of passages on the SAT reading section. Learn how to organize passages according to their goals and subjects to build confidence for the test.

Critical Reading

On the critical reading section of the SAT, you'll see two different types of questions. Sentence completionsare questions with a sentence containing either one blank or two blanks. Your job is to pick the best word or words for the blanks. The other type, the passage-based reading questions, will give you a passage of text and ask you questions about it. The passages may be short (one paragraph) or long (multiple paragraphs).

Both of these question types reward smart test takers who bone up on strategy beforehand. In this lesson, we'll walk through some strategy hints for scoring your best on the SAT reading section, broken down into three different categories:

• Vocab: Help for tackling ten-dollar words without losing your mind
• Question order: How to use the arrangement of the questions on the test to your advantage
• Answer choices: Hints for making the answer choices work for you, not the other way around

Vocab Tips

One strategy for handling a word you aren't sure of is to examine it closely and look for roots. Don't give up right away when a word isn't immediately familiar. Before just deciding that you don't know a word, look at it more closely. Are there roots that you do know? Does it sound like any other word that you're familiar with? This will help you use roots and similar words to make an educated guess, even when you don't know.

A second strategy is to use context. You can often use the context of a word to figure out more or less what it should mean - at least well enough to answer an SAT question about that sentence in general.

Example: Pale and etiolated after her long illness, Marissa drooped like a houseplant that hadn't gotten enough sun for a year.

In this sentence, you can get the idea that etiolated has something to do with being sick and looking unwell without needing to spend a lot of time on the word itself. The way you apply these strategies to the questions will depend on what kind of question you're tackling.

On the sentence completions, the whole focus of the question is on the vocabulary. So, on these questions, it's worthwhile to spend more time on the words. You'll probably want to use both roots and context to figure out the words as well as you can. But most passage-based reading questions are testing comprehension, not vocabulary. The key is to get a good enough understanding of the passage to answer general questions, not to completely know every word.

For the few passage questions that focus on individual words, it helps to spend more time on the words if you don't know them. But on most of the passage questions, try to use some context clues and cut down the time you spend on individual vocab words - it just doesn't pay off in terms of points on the test. And definitely don't agonize over a word in the passage if there's no question about it. You can almost always figure it out well enough from context to get on with the questions.

Question Order

On top of managing your time on the vocab words, another way to be smart about SAT strategy is to work the question order to your advantage. On the sentence completions, this means starting at the beginning since sentence completion questions go from easy to hard. But passage questions won't be arranged in order of difficulty. Instead, passage questions follow the order of the passage - a question on line 1 will come first and so on.

These questions are not in order of difficulty, but each question is still worth the same number of points. So, considering that you're under time pressure and may not be able to hit all the questions, it's to your advantage to identify and knock off the easy questions first. Start with the specific questions - the ones that give you a particular line in the passage. These questions tell you exactly where to find the answer, so you don't have to spend time skimming through the passage to find it.

If the question doesn't give you a specific line, you can also use its position in the list to help you. For example, if question 1 asks you about line 14 and question 3 asks you about line 25, question 2 will ask you about something in between lines 14 and 25. This can help you quickly find the information you need without re-skimming the entire passage.

You can also switch up the order of the passages. There's no reason why you need to do the first passage first! The passages aren't in any kind of difficulty order. The short passages typically come first, but you can skip straight to the long passages and come back to the short ones later if you'd rather.

On the other hand, don't jump around from one passage to the next; you'll just waste time re-skimming to remind yourself of what each passage is about. Finish one passage as well as you can and then move on to the next.

Answer Choices

Finally, let's talk about answer choices. Using the answer choices wisely is a key to scoring high on the SAT because the answer choices are designed to trap you into picking the wrong one. To avoid this, always have an answer in your head before you even glance at the answer choices. Don't look at the answer choices first.

This can be a very tough habit to get into because most people's instinct is to go straight for the answers. On practice tests, use your hand to cover the answers until you think of an answer yourself.

It's not just about avoiding traps, though. You can actually make the answer choices work for you with the strategic use of elimination. The SAT is set up to make total guessing a bad idea, so don't just fill in bubbles at random. But if you can eliminate two or more answers, it's to your advantage to guess. This goes for both the sentence completions and the passage questions.