Welcome to
McGraw-Hill Education
SAT
Congratulations! You’ve chosen the SAT guide from America’s leading educational publisher. You probably know us from many of the textbooks you used in school. Now we’re ready to help you take the next step–and get into the college or university of your choice.
This book gives you everything you need to succeed on the test. You’ll get in-depth instruction and review of every topic tested, tips and strategies for every question type, and practice exams to boost your test-taking confidence. To get started, go to the following pages where you’ll find:
How to Use This Book: Step-by-step instructions to help you get the most out of your testprep program.
Your SAT Action Plan: Learn how to make the best use of your preparation time.
SAT Format Table: This handy chart shows the test structure at a glance: question types, time limits, and number of questions per section.
The 40 Top Strategies for Test Day: Use this list to check your knowledge, or as a lastminute refresher before the exam.
The 5 Top SAT Calculator Tips: Learn some smart ways that your calculator can help you.
Getting the Most from the Free Online Practice Tests: Log on to the companion website for more test-taking practice.
ABOUT McGRAW-HILL EDUCATION
How to Use This Book
This book is designed for students who want an effective program for the most dramatic SAT score improvements. It is based on the College Hill MethodTM, the elite training system used by the tutors of College Hill Coaching since 1990. It focuses on what works best in SAT prep: mindful training in the reasoning skills at the core of the SAT, and not just test-taking tricks or mindless drills.
This book provides all the material you need to score well on the SAT. It will teach you the knowledge that is required for this exam, including information about each type of question on the test. It also provides ample practice for you to refine the skills you are learning and then test yourself with full-length practice tests. For best results as you work your way through the book and the accompanying online tests, use this four-step program that follows:
1 Learn About the SAT
Don’t skip Chapter 1. In it you’ll meet the SAT and learn exactly what academic skills it tests. You’ll also find valuable test-taking strategies and information about how the test is scored.
2 Take a Realistic Practice SAT
Take the SAT diagnostic test in Chapter 2 of this book. Take the test strictly timed, in one sitting, and proctored if possible. Then use the answer key to evaluate your results so you can learn your strengths and weaknesses.
3 Study What You Need to Learn with the Lessons and Exercises
If you miss a question on your practice SAT, read its answer explanation at the end of the test. If it refers to a lesson in Chapters 4–10, make that lesson part of your weekly review.
First read each Lesson carefully, underlining important ideas or writing notes in the margins.
Check your understanding of the concepts and skills in these lessons by working through the questions and answers in each Exercise Set.
When you’re done, read all of the explanations in the Answer Key, even for questions that you got right. Why? Because very often, there are many ways to get a question right, and some may be much more efficient than the one you used!
4 Repeat the Cycle Until You’ve Surpassed Your SAT Score Goal
Take the practice tests in this book and on the companion website, trying each time to simulate actual testing conditions. Then correct your test with the detailed answer key, and review the relevant lessons in Chapters 4–10 that will help you to improve your skills for the next test.
Your SAT Action Plan
To make the best use of your SAT preparation time, you’ll need a personalized action plan that’s based on your needs and the time you have available. This book has been designed for flexi bility; you can work through it from cover to cover or you can move around from one chapter to another in the order you want based on your own priorities and needs. However, before you jump in, maximize the effectiveness of your preparation time by spending a few minutes to develop a realistic action plan. Use the tools provided in these pages to help you focus on the areas where you are weakest, plan your study program, and gain the discipline you need to pace yourself and achieve your goals.
The College Hill SAT Study Plan
Each time you take a practice SAT in this book or online, take a few minutes to review your performance and make a plan for improving your scores on the next test.
Questions About Your Performance
1 What were your test conditions? Did you take your practice SAT as you would take a real SAT? Were you sitting at a desk and at a neutral site? Did you time yourself strictly? Did you take the test all at one sitting? If your conditions were not realistic, make sure that they are more realistic next time. Also, note any conditions that may have affected your performance, like “broken clock,” “noisy radiator,” “freezing room,” or “phone interruption.” Learning to deal with distrac -tions and with the length and time limits of the SAT is very important to peak performance.
2 What was your pre-test routine? What you do just before the test can be very important to your performance. Having a raging argument with someone, for instance, probably won’t help. To perform your best, get at least 8 hours of sleep the night before, get 30 minutes of exercise prior to the SAT, and have a good breakfast. Write down anything significant that you did just prior to the test, like “ran 4 miles,” “had oatmeal and orange juice,” “was yelled at by Dad,” or “did 15 minutes of yoga.”
3 Did you attack the questions you need to attack? The score conversion tables at the end of each practice test (for instance, those on pages 68–69), show you how many questions you need to answer correctly on each section to make your score goals. After each test, ask yourself, “How many more points do I need, and how can I get them?” Try to find patterns among the questions you missed, so you know which sections in this book to review before the next test.
4 Did you rush to complete any section? Rushing is never a good strategy on the SAT. You must learn to work briskly, but attentively. After you complete a practice SAT, ask yourself: did I make any careless errors because I was rushing?
5 Study Plan. This is the real key to improving your SAT score. Go to the answer explanations and carefully read the explanations for the questions you missed. Then notice the types of questions you missed, and make a plan to review the corresponding lessons in this book. For instance, you might write down in your notebook that you need to “Learn about dangling participles,” or “Review how to simplify polynomials.”
Your Weekly SAT Study Schedule
A complete SAT preparation program usually requires between 8 and 12 weeks, depending on your skill and comfort level with the test. Be diligent, but don’t overwhelm yourself. Your schoolwork should take priority over SAT prep—colleges care a lot about those grades, and for good reason! But if you make a manageable plan to work for at least 30 minutes every weeknight on your SAT review, you will see great results in just a matter of weeks.
Remember that it is more productive to do some work every day rather than a lot of work just one day a week.
Your daily SAT work should include learning 5–10 new vocabulary words and roots from Chapter 3 and, if you are taking the Essay component, reading and analyzing at least one Op-Ed from the New York Times. (Chapter 6 will explain how to do this.) Analytical reading is more important than ever on the SAT, so practice it every day! Also, set aside 20–30 minutes each day to work through the lessons and worksheets in this book.
How to Stick to Your Study Plan
Twenty minutes of cardiovascular exercise is a great warm-up before you start your homework. Exercise doesn’t help just your muscles; it also helps your brain. When your brain is well oxygenated, it works more efficiently, so you do your work better and faster. If you don’t already have an exercise routine, try to build up to a good 20- to 45-minute aerobic workout—running, rowing, swimming, biking—every day. Your routine will also help you enormously on test day; exercising on the morning of the SAT will help you to relax, focus, and perform!
If you get nervous when you think about the SAT, try learning “mindfulness” exercises, like deep breathing, meditation, or yoga. Such exercises will also help enormously on test day.
Prepare your space. Many students waste a lot of study time because they don’t prepare their work space properly. Find a quiet, clean place where you can stay focused for a good stretch of time, away from the TV and troublesome siblings. Sit in an upright chair at a table or desk with good lighting. Also, make sure that all the tools you will need are within easy reach: a dictionary, note cards, calculator, and pencils with erasers. Turn off your cell phone and close the door!
Sit up straight when you work. Don’t work on your bed, on the floor, or in a reclining chair. When your body tilts, your brain goes into “sleep mode” and has to work harder to focus.
Whenever you feel fatigued from studying, take a 10-minute break. Get a quick snack or listen to a couple of your favorite songs. But stay focused. Don’t get sucked into returning twenty text messages.
40 Top Strategies for Test Day
Here are 40 key reminders for success on test day. Take a quick glance through this list on the morning of the test to make sure you can put all of your preparation to use and get your best score.
General Strategies
1 Take control. Not every student will ace the SAT, but any student can take charge of it. Go into the test with confidence and the game plan that you’ve put together.
2 Lay everything out the night before. You’ll sleep easier the night before the SAT knowing that you’re ready to go. Lay out three #2 pencils with good erasers, your calculator with fresh batteries, your admission ticket, your photo ID, and a snack.
3 Have a good breakfast. Your brain can’t work well without fuel. Have a good breakfast including fruit, complex carbohydrates, and protein. You’ll be glad you ate a good breakfast when you’re entering hour 3 of the SAT!
4 Know where you’re going.If you’re taking the SAT at an unfamiliar school, acquaint yourself with it before test day. Take a trip there in a few days before the test so you don’t worry about getting lost on test day.
5 Dress properly. Dress in light layers so you’ll be comfortable whether the testing room is swelter -ing or frigid. An uncomfortable body makes for a distracted brain.
6 Get a good two nights’ sleep. A rested brain is a smarter brain. The nights before the SAT are for sleeping, not for all-nighters. Get a good eight hours each of the two nights before your SAT.
7 Get some exercise. The SAT is given in the morning, when most of us are a bit foggy, so get a leg up on the competition by waking your brain with exercise. Twenty minutes of cardio will keep you alert.
8 Bring a snack. Your brain burns calories when it’s thinking hard. Bring a granola bar, banana, or energy bar to the SAT to refuel during the break.
9 Know what to attack. As you begin each section of your SAT, know how many points you need to make your score goal on that section, and focus on hitting that goal. Even if you have to guess on all the rest of the questions for that section, you won’t feel discouraged if you’ve hit your goal.
10 Take a “two-pass” approach. If you’ve built a smart game plan and practiced with it, you should have enough time to tackle all of your “must answer” questions, then take one more pass through them, checking for common mistakes. Once all of your “must answer” questions have been double-checked, you can approach the hardest questions carefully.
11 Shut out distractions. If you have a game plan and have practiced it, you should feel confident enough to shut out everyone else during the test. Don’t speed up just because the girl next to you is racing through her test. Ignore her: she’s probably rushing because she’s nervous. Stick to your game plan. Also, if you are easily distracted by noises around you like tapping pencils, sniffling testers, or clanking radiators, bring a pair of wax earplugs.
12 Watch the clock—but not too much. If you have taken enough practice SATs, you should go into the test with confidence in your ability to pace yourself through each section. But, for insurance, you might want to bring a silent stopwatch (not a cell phone timer) and check it occasionally to make sure you’re on pace.
13 Work briskly, but not carelessly. Don’t get bogged down on tough questions: if you get stuck on a question, just make a guess, circle the question in your test booklet (in case you have time to come back to it later), and move on. Remember, rushing is never a good strategy. Optimize your score by working briskly enough to attack all of the questions you need to, but not so quickly that you make careless errors.
14 Don’t worry about answer patterns. Some SAT takers refuse to make certain patterns on their answer sheet. For instance, they won’t mark (C)—even if it’s clearly the best answer—if they already have three (C)s in a row. Bad idea: pick what you think is the best answer, regardless of any answer patterns.
Reading Test
15 Don’t psych yourself out on the reading sections. On the Reading Test, don’t psych yourself out with negative self-talk. Instead, take a positive attitude, remind yourself of the key strategies from Chapter 5, and tell yourself that you’re going to learn something interesting.
16 Focus on the 3 key questions. The key to good reading comprehension is answering three key questions discussed in Chapter 5: What is the purpose? What is the main idea? And what is the overall structure of the passage?
17 Get your own answer first. On the Reading Test, don’t jump to the choices too quickly. Instead, read each question carefully and think of your own answer first, then find the choice that best matches it. This will help you avoid the “traps.”
18 Deal with your “space outs.” Many students “space out” on the Reading Test because they get over whelmed or disoriented when reading about topics like paleontology or primitivism. If it happens to you, don’t panic and don’t rush. Just continue from where you left off.
19 Be selective on the reading questions. Unlike the other SAT sections, the reading questions don’t get progressively harder. If you get to a tough reading question, make a guess and move on; the next one might be easier.
20 Don’t fall for the traps. Always read critical reading questions very carefully. Many choices are “traps:” they make true statements about the passage, but they are not “correct” because they do not answer the question asked. You won’t fall for them if you get your own answer first.
21 Know how to attack the “paired passages.” On the “paired” passages (Passage 1 vs. Passage 2), it is generally best to read Passage 1 and then go right to the questions that pertain to Passage 1 before moving on to Passage 2. If you try to read the passages back-to-back, it may be harder to recall and distinguish the key information from the two passages. Don’t let them run together.
Writing and Language Test
22 Know the key grammar rules. Go into the SAT writing with a solid understanding of the key grammar rules. If you can’t explain parallelism, dangling participles, or pronoun case errors, make sure you study Chapter 4 carefully!
23 Trust your ear (at least at first). If you’ve read a lot of good prose in your life, you have probably developed a good ear for the rules of grammar and usage grammar. On the easy and medium writing questions, then, your ear will be your best guide: bad phrases will “sound” wrong. On harder questions, however, your skill in analyzing sentences will come into play.
24 Know how to analyze the tricky sentences. Chapter 4 provides lots of exercises to help you to recognize the most relevant grammar mistakes and to analyze sentences like a pro. You’ll need to know how to do things like “trim” sentences to catch the trickiest errors.
25 Don’t fear perfection. On SAT Writing and Language Test questions, the NO CHANGE choice should be correct roughly 1/4 of the time over the long term. Bottom line: don’t shy away from NO CHANGE but choose it only after careful analysis.
26 Make sure it’s a real mistake. On SAT Writing and Language Test questions, a word or phrase isn’t necessarily wrong just because you might say it differently. For instance, if the word since is underlined, don’t assume it’s incorrect just because you prefer to say because—the words are inter chang e able. Make sure that you know how to fix the mistake—and that it’s a real grammatical or semantic mistake—before choosing it.
27 Keep the overall purpose and tone in mind. Many Writing and Language Test questions require you to understand the overall purpose and tone of particular paragraphs or the passage as a whole. Don’t lose the overall picture by focusing too narrowly on the details.
28 Read it again to check. Before choosing an answer on a Writing and Language Test question, always re-read the entire sentence, including the correction, to make sure the sentence flows smoothly and logically. If the whole sentence doesn’t sound better, it’s wrong.
Math Test
29 Mark up the test. The best SAT takers do lots of scratch work, particularly on the math section. Don’t be afraid to write on your test booklet. The SAT doesn’t award points for neatness! Write down what you know and show your steps. Mark up diagrams, write equations, and show your work so that you can check it when you come back later.
30 Look for patterns and use them. One important skill the SAT Math Test is “pattern finding.” Always pay special attention to simple patterns or repetitions in a problem, because exploiting them is usually the key to the solution.
31 Keep it simple. If you’re doing lots of calculations to solve an SAT math problem, you might be overlooking a key fact that simplifies the problem. Always look for the easy way.
32 Know the basic formulas. Many formulas you will need for the SAT Math Test are given to you in the “Reference Information” at the beginning of each Math Test section. Even so, get fluent in them so you can easily recognize when to use them. Also, use flash cards to review the key formulas from algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and statistics from Chapters 7–10.
33 Check your work. There are many ways to make careless mistakes on the SAT math. Give yourself time to go back and check over your arithmetic and algebra, and make sure everything’s okay.
34 Consider different approaches. If you’re stuck on a math question, try working backwards from the choices, or plugging in numbers for the unknowns.
35 Watch out for key words. Pay special attention to words like integer, even, odd, and consecutive when they show up, because students commonly overlook them. And make sure you don’t confuse area with perimeter!
36 Don’t overuse your calculator. Your calculator can be handy on the the Math with Calculator section, but don’t overuse it. If you’re doing a lot of calculator work for a problem, you’re probably making it too hard. Keep it simple.
37 Re-read the question. Before finalizing your answer, re-read the question to be sure you’ve answered the right question. If it asks for 5x, don’t give the value for x!
Essay
38 Be ready for the essay. If you are taking the Essay component of the SAT, you will need to go in to the test with a clear understanding of what SAT essay readers are looking for: an essay that shows good reading comprehenison, thorough rhetorical analysis, logical organization, and strong writing skills.
39 Put aside 20 minutes. When the essay section starts, take at least 20 minutes to read the target essay carefully, analyze it, and plan your response, as discussed in Chapter 6. You should still have plenty of time to write a solid essay, and it will flow much more easily.
40 Write at least 5 paragraphs. According to The College Board, a good SAT essay “is well organized and clearly focused, demonstrating clear coherence and smooth progression of ideas.” This means that you must use paragraphs effectively. Think of your paragraphs as the “stepping stones” of your essay. Three or four stepping stones don’t make for much of a journey, do they?
The 5 Top SAT Calculator Tips
1. Don’t Overuse the Calculator
Even though a calculator is permitted on one of the SAT Math sections, don’t let your calculator think for you. The SAT Math Test is more of a reasoning test than a calculation test. If you find yourself depending on your calculator for every question, you need to wean yourself off of it and start working on your thinking skills!
Of course, smart calculator use is occasionally helpful, as the following examples show.
2. Know How to MATH 
FRAC
Let’s say you’re solving an SAT math problem about probabilities and you get 34/85 as an answer, but the choices are
A. 4/17
B. 2/7
C. 2/5
D. 3/7
E. 7/17
Did you mess up? No—you just have to simplify. Here, a TI-83 or similar calculator with 
FRAC might save you time. Type “34/85” and enter, then press the MATH button and then FRAC. Like magic, it will convert the fraction to lowest terms: 2/5. Sweet!
On “grid in” questions, it’s also a good idea to MATHFRAC any decimal answer you get to make sure that it gives a fraction that can fit into the grid. If not, you’ve probably done something wrong!
3. Know How to Get a Remainder
Consider this math question: The tables at a wedding reception are set up to accommodate 212 people. There are 24 tables, some seating 8 people and the rest seating 9 people. How many 9-seat tables are there?
Without getting into the details, the answer is simply the remainder when 212 is divided by 24. You could do this by long division, but you can probably do it faster with a calculator:
4. Beware of “Killer Program” Gimmicks
Don’t believe your friends who tell you they have a killer “SAT-busting” calculator program. They don’t. These are usually gimmicks that waste time rather than save it. Again, if you’re depending on your calculator to do anything but check basic calculations, you’re thinking about the SAT in the wrong way.
5. Get Fresh Batteries
Even if you don’t use your calculator much, you won’t be happy if it dies halfway through the SAT. Put in a set of fresh batteries the night before!