As I continue to read, I am finding that Up Your Score: The Underground Guide to the SAT is an ever more useful book. I am working through the part on the verbal section of the SAT. The book begins with a section about fill in the blank problems. These problems are to test your vocabulary. I find it very useful that they tell you what key words to look for and what they mean in the question. They break it up into looking for positive words and negative words, whether words agree or conflict, and seeing relationships between words in the fill in the blank section.

The next section that is discussed is the analogy section. This book breaks up analogies into eleven categories: synonyms, antonyms, a thing and what it’s used for, cause and effect, things that go together, type of person and something that person would use, type of person and something that person would do, relative size, relative degrees of the same thing, description, and part and whole. They also use the practical saying of “blank is to blank as blank is to blank.”

Next comes the critical reading passage. They do not suggest skimming as you miss details, yet they emphasize annotating. Still, their suggestions are dotted by humor. One strategy they give for helping you get through the critical reading passage is to “read the passage, then translate the whole thing into Swedish. (This will help only if you are Swedish.)” Clearly, they are all about making the reader comfortable with the subject matter yet keeping the mood light so as to keep the reader interested. As they go through strategies on what the questions are about, in the section on author’s logic, they suggest you “pretend you’re the author (but don’t spend the time the real author ought to spend regretting ever having written such a boring, useless passave).”

As they begin to talk about SAT words, they give a list of stems to look for. This is very helpful and reminds me of how I learned Greek and Latin stems in fourth and fifth grade. These stems have been very useful in helping me to learn vocabulary. I didn’t learn them at the time, but I remember them now. Thus they have come in handy. This is how I deal with the vocabulary tests in etymology class. This is also how I break down words in my everyday reading.