SAT test preparation should cover all the three sections of the SAT. You should be good at solving math problems, answering questions on the basis of English passages, and write an essay properly. The Critical Reading section, for many students, is a nightmare. In my experience with students undergoing SAT test preparation, I have come across excuses like ‘passages were boring’, ‘the passage was too literary’, and ‘passage had difficult words’.

I do not say that all passages on the Critical Reading section of the SAT are interesting. Perhaps, this is the reason why students find it difficult to read such passages. In this article, I would try to analyze the Critical Reading section.

The Critical Reading section consists of four to six sentence completion questions. This is followed by some reading passages that require you to answer multiple-choice questions. Sentence completion requires you to fill in one (or two) blanks from the answer choices in a way that makes the sentence logical as well as meaningful.

What does the sentence completion section test? Most sentence completion questions test your vocabulary, and our ability to find relationships between words, and sentence fragments. How can you do well on the sentence completion section?

Enrich your vocabulary

Since sentence completion questions primarily judge your vocabulary, you should try building your vocabulary. Improving your vocabulary would not come through the rote learning approach. Though almost ever SAT study guide would give you a lengthy (3000-4000) word list (with meanings), it is impractical to memorize the whole list. It is also ineffective to some extent as one word can have more than one meaning. The best way to augment your vocabulary is to go through a list of roots and prefixes (Latin, Greek, English etc.).

The second aspect of sentence completion questions deals with the skill to locate the relationship between words and parts of the sentence. The best advice I can give in this context is to read each and every part of the sentence carefully. Remember, every word in a sentence is in its place for some reason. Next step would be trying to fill in the blank using the word that comes to your mind, without having looked at the answer choices. This would help you eliminate one or more options from the answer choice.

Every year on the SAT students make the same mistakes in the sentence completion section. The first blunder they do is not reading the sentence carefully. As a result, they fail to understand the meaning of the given sentence as a whole (and not just its fragments). Secondly, students spend a lot of time on each question. If you get stuck with this section (which is the first section of the Critical Reading part), you would not have much time left to deal with passage-based questions. Almost every SAT study guide would warn students to skip a question if it’s taking a lot of time.

Summarizing the techniques mentioned above, building vocabulary, reading questions carefully, eliminating choices on the basis of your own answer, and skipping questions that are time consuming, would help you steer clear of the mistakes students make on the Critical Reading section of the SAT test. Students should use SAT practice tests to get a feel of the Critical Reading section.