The SAT Reading Test

A Complete Guide for Indian Students About The SAT Reading Test

This section of the test consists of five reading passages followed by multiple-choice questions regarding each passage. This exam consists of 52 questions and you will have 65 minutes to finish it. Passages from science, history, and social studies are all included in the Reading Test. Questions will be based on the kinds of reading knowledge and abilities most important for your success in the given disciplines. For instance, after reading a description of an experiment, you can be presented with questions that require you to: 

• Analyze potential explanations.
• Read between the lines of information.
• Think about what this means.

The SAT Reading Test evaluates your comprehension skills using passages and questions that are typical of academic and professional reading. Each question on the reading section of the exam corresponds to either a single text, a pair of passages, or a piece accompanied by one or more informative graphics (tables, charts, and graphs). There are a total of 52 questions in the reading section of each exam, spread among five sections with 10–11 questions each. Two shorter texts will be "paired" together to form one of the five sets of questions. There will be a reading exam, and you will have 65 minutes to do it.

SAT Reading Test: Content Areas

• This post is part of a series that examines the SAT Reading Section in great detail. The Test has multiple-choice and essay questions, as well as reading passages covering the following topics:
• Prose fiction works from writers from the United States and throughout the world, both modern and classic, are included. These works, published by both well-known and lesser-known writers from the 18th through the 21st centuries, may be whole short tales or excerpts from longer works.
• Sub-domains of the History/Social Studies domain include the Social Science and Founding Documents/Great Global Conversation categories of literature. Information and concepts from the social sciences, such as anthropology, communication studies, economics, education, human geography, law, linguistics, politics, psychology, and sociology, are included in the Social Science subarea. Graphs and paired readings are common in social science articles. Some questions will have you draw conclusions about the connections between different parts of the image, while others will have you compare and contrast the interconnections between sections presented in pairs. Included in the Founding Documents/Great Global Conversations is both classic and contemporary works by American and international authors who are wrestling with political, legal, social, moral, and ethical issues in an effort to answer the simple but profound question, "How should we live together?" Texts from the Great Global Conversation and the Founding Documents are sometimes paired together.
• Included are sections containing content culled from the subjects of biology, chemistry, physics, and Earth science, as well as their respective subdisciplines. Recent findings, new ideas and theories, and novel research techniques and methodologies may all be discussed in various passages. Images or paired readings are commonplace in science articles. You'll be asked to draw conclusions about the connections between elements in the picture or to compare and contrast the similarities and differences between two texts presented in pairs. Students will see Literature, History, Sociology, and Science as options on Khan Academy's Official SAT Practice. History contains both the Founding Documents and the Great Global Conversation books.
• The exam does not need you to memorise the specific names of these groups, but doing so will help you better understand the material presented in the passage.

The SAT Reading Test: Information and Ideas

Queries concerning information and ideas are, at their core, questions about the author's intended meaning. Reading comprehension, citing textual evidence, identifying core ideas and themes, summarising, analysing connections, and interpreting words and phrases from their context are all skills tested by questions in this section. Questions in this section concentrate on the information and ideas presented in the text (directly or indirectly). Understanding the author's intent requires looking not just at direct statements but also at things that are strongly inferred. All items on the Reading Test will have a text with which they correspond, but that passage is not listed here. Each graphic represents one possible form of a question falling under that heading. Here are a few examples of more specific themes covered by Information and Ideas:

• First, you'll need to read carefully to answer questions that require you to either pick out specific facts and details from the text or to develop your own conclusions based on what you know about the subject matter. The questions may require you to extrapolate from the text to a different circumstance that is conceptually similar.
• To answer these questions, you will need to find specific examples in the text that back up your claims.
• Third, you'll need to be able to determine the key concepts and topics of the text in order to answer the questions on this section.
• Fourth, you will be asked to summarise a text or a section of a passage and answer questions on whether or not your summary is an effective summary.
• 5.Relationships: These questions will test your ability to make inferences about the relationships between or among the characters, events, or ideas in the material.
• Determining the meaning of words and phrases in their context These questions will need you to determine the exact meaning of a word or phrase based on its usage in the context of a chapter.

The SAT Reading Test: Rhetoric

Rhetorical questions probe your comprehension of the author's reasoning behind a passage's construction. In many Rhetoric questions, a clear comprehension of the author's intent or perspective is crucial to a successful response. In the following paragraphs, we'll examine each of these subsets in turn. One definition of rhetoric is "the study of writing or speaking." The Reading Test includes rhetorical analysis questions to gauge how well you comprehend the decisions writers make in crafting their works. All items on the Reading Test will have a text with which they correspond, but that passage is not listed here. Each graphic represents one possible form of a question falling under that heading. There are five basic kinds of questions here:

• Word choice analysis involves deducing the author's intended meaning, tone, and style by close examination of the specific words, phrases, and language patterns used in a text.

• Dissecting text structure, or explaining how a paragraph is put together and how each section serves the total.

• Understanding the viewpoint from which a passage is told and how that viewpoint impacts the passage's substance and style is referred to as "point-of-view analysis."
• The primary rhetorical goal of a passage or a substantial element of the passage, such as a paragraph, may be identified by careful analysis of the text.
• Analyzing arguments entails looking at the author's use of claims, counterclaims, logic, evidence, and other persuasive devices.

The SAT Reading Test: Synthesis

The SAT Exam Reading Test includes a question type called "synthesis," which asks you to draw inferences and develop connections between two texts that are connected to one another or between a reading and an informative graphic. There are 44 multiple-choice questions on the SAT Writing & Language section, and you'll have 35 minutes to respond. There are a total of 4 readings, and 11 questions accompany each. Each section is between 400 and 450 words long and covers a wide variety of topics, including jobs, history, social studies, the humanities, and science. There may be one or more data visualisations referenced in the questions and/or passages. You'll be asked to make changes to the section in the SAT Writing Question that corresponds to the visual to make it more coherent with the facts supplied in the image. The majority of questions on the SAT Writing & Language Test will have you choose the best of three options for a highlighted section of text or declare that the present version is the best choice. To verify the sections adhere to normal English grammar, use, and style, you will be required to revise their development, organisation, and diction.

SAT Reading Scoring Pattern

It's a number between 400 and 1600 that represents your overall score. The total is determined by adding the results from the two subtests (Mathematics and Evidence-Based Reading and Writing). Both of these subscores might be anywhere from 200 to 800. Both the Reading Test and the Writing and Language Test count equally to the section score for Evidence-Based Reading and Writing. Only the results of the Math Test will count toward your total score in that category.