Here’s an important thing to remember: all figures on the SAT are drawn to scale unless indicated otherwise. In other words, if it doesn’t say “Note: figure not drawn to scale,” underneath it, it is drawn to scale. Most figures on the SAT are drawn to scale, which means it’s a good idea to guesstimate whenever (more…)
If you’ve ever sat down and taken a practice (or real) SAT, you’ve come across shaded region questions. They’re among the most iconic question types on the test, so much so that you may find that the memory of them remains with you long after your SAT taking days have passed. True story: I had (more…)
So, I trust by now you know what’s going on with regular triangles, and with angles in general. Right triangles get a post all to themselves because they’re special, and have some rules of their very own. Let’s dig in, shall we? Ancient Greece was awesome. First, let’s briefly review the Pythagorean theorem. You know (more…)
Before we get into triangles, we need to take a very quick look at the ingredients of a triangle: line segments and angles. Please tell me you already know this stuff: We good? Cool. Prove it: In the figure above, AE, BS, CG, DS, and FS intersect at point S. Which of the following (more…)
source I was looking over the visitor stats for this blog last night and I was pleasantly surprised to discover a small international audience! The SAT is administered all over the world, and at least a few people have visited this site from (in order of frequency) Singapore, Hungary, India, Vietnam, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Iran, (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 did a Google Image Search for “badass” and this is what I got. Yes. I agree. Print your Admission Ticket. If your printer is going to decide to barf when it prints your ticket, better to find out today while you can still print it somewhere else. Tomorrow morning, that’d be a big deal. Today, (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…)
source. I’m constantly reminding students to look for patterns. The key to transcendent scores is pattern recognition. If you want to be a truly adroit test taker, you’re going to have to devote yourself to taking every test you take actively. Obviously, you should be looking for patterns in the kinds of mistakes you’re making, (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…)
