The Foreign Service Journal, December 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2021 81 Science sections each have six or seven passages and each passage should take 6-7 minutes. The SAT is less time-constrained, although the passages are longer and the math questions oftenmore complicated. Each Reading passage has 10 or 11 ques- tions and takes on average 13 minutes. The Writing and Language passages have 11 questions and average 8-9 minutes each. Math-without-calculator questions average 75 seconds. Math-with-calculator questions have a little more time— roughly 86 seconds per question. You will want to use your breaks—eat, drink, use the bathroom, close your eyes and do some deep breathing, notice and relax any areas of tension in your body and, above all, stand up and move around! 2. The tests are (almost) all multiple choice. Technique —Use your pencil (SAT) or pencil and online tools (ACT) to attack and eliminate answer choices. The Reading sections of both tests are entirely multiple choice, and a typical question will have two clearly incorrect answer choices, one tempting answer and one correct answer. The people who write the test do not want any calls from students question- ing their work, so they make sure the correct answer is definitively correct and the incorrect answers have something definitively wrong with them. Since three of the choices are wrong, attacking the answers—figuring out what’s wrong—is the correct strategy (this is dif- ferent from the “defending of interpreta- tions” you often do in English class). Ways to attack: Does your choice answer exactly what is being asked? Continued on page 84