Here’s a question I love to throw at students early on in the tutoring process (let’s call this a grid-in for now, to keep things simple): If , what is x? It’s a beautiful question because no matter what, it’s going to show me something about the kid with whom I’m working. Almost everyone goes (more…)
I’ve done my best here to be faithful to the structure of an SAT section 10, although I’ve obviously been a bit loose with the subject matter. Since this is designed to mirror a section 10, though, you should time yourself on it. You’ll get 10 minutes to complete the last writing section on the (more…)
OK, so you know how I’m always saying that the SAT is not a math test? This is one of the primary reasons why. On the SAT, it’s often completely unnecessary to do the math that’s been so carefully laid out before you. A lot of the time (and on a lot of the most (more…)
Leonardo da Vinci totally <3’d parabolas. The parabola is actually a hugely important mathematical concept with tons of forms, properties, and even its own history. It can open up, down, left, right, or any other direction. It can be used to graph the trajectory of my last AT&T cell phone that I threw in a (more…)
I found this image here. You can be sure that you’re going to encounter exponents on the SAT. Hopefully, once you’ve been through this post, you’ll look forward to the opportunity to spank these questions like they deserve. Look at them, mocking you. They’re totally asking for it. Show no mercy. The Basic Exponent Rules (more…)
I found Leonardo here. When it comes to sentence completion questions, it’s important to have some idea what you’re looking for before you hit the choices. In fact, it’s a really good idea to cover up the choices while you read the question, and not to uncover them until you have a pretty decent idea (more…)
Not all function questions have weird symbols, some are just vanilla f(x) type things. You’ve probably been working with the f(x) notation in school for some time now, but let’s review some of the things you’ll see over and over again on the SAT: Interpreting function notation One thing you’re definitely going to need to (more…)
source One of the SAT’s most nefarious tricks is the symbol function. That doesn’t mean you should let it intimidate you, though. In fact, symbol functions (and function questions in general) are some of the easiest hard questions you’re going to come across. Which is to say: these questions come late in sections because kids (more…)
If I asked told you it was my birthday and I wanted a cake, what would you do? You’ve got two choices: buy a bunch of ingredients and start baking, or go to a different aisle in the grocery store and just buy the cake. Baking the cake yourself is not only more time consuming (more…)
When I was in high school, I weighed 125 pounds fully clothed and soaking wet. I couldn’t do anything to change it, either. That was the worst part. I yearned to play varsity baseball, but at my weight, I just straight up wasn’t big enough. College was mostly the same, although I filled out a (more…)
broccoli fractal (source) Pattern questions on the SAT aren’t super common, but they tend to give people all sorts of difficulty when they do appear. Let’s take one apart. A farmer is planting a row of plants. He first plants 2 broccoli plants, then 3 cabbage plants, then 1 apple tree, then 2 orange trees, (more…)
source The SAT loves to ask a particular kind of question about averages that can pretty confusing without a nice, easy way to organize your information. Enter The Average Table. KNEEL WHEN IT ENTERS THE ROOM, KNAVE! Seriously, this thing kicks ass. To build it, just remember what you have known for a long time (more…)
Let’s talk a bit about lines. Like everything else on the SAT, questions about lines will require some very basic knowledge of a few math rules, but you don’t need to know everything you ever learned about Cartesian coordinate planes. It’s important to be able to differentiate what’s important from what’s not. We’ll get into (more…)
NOTE: This post is about the OLD SAT (pre-2016). The current SAT DOES require you to know things like circle equations and trigonometry. Because the current SAT will also still ask questions like the ones discussed in this post, though, you may still find the information below useful. Circles can be difficult to deal (more…)
The parabola in the figure above has its minimum at x = 2. Which of the following could be an x-intercept of the parabola? (A) 2.5 (B) 3 (C) 3.5 (D) 4 (E) 4.5 Answer and explanation after the jump… The most important thing you can remember about parabolas is this: A PARABOLA IS (more…)
