The SAT operates differently from what you might expect. It has one common feature for all three verbal sections: visualization.
The human being learns, remembers, imagines, and thinks in images. In other words, thought operates visually. If you think of your last vacation, a picture jumps to mind. You may picture the plane or the name of the place perhaps. In any case, you visualize the thought.
Therefore, the faster the student can "see" both the problems and the answers that the text designer has in mind, the more certainly the right choice jumps to mind.
The Educational Testing Service (ETS)
The Educational Testing Service, the creator of the SAT, has recently changed the test. ETS has eliminated the antonym vocabulary exercise (the student chose the opposite meaning) and the The Test of Standard Written English (TSWE). Now three exercises remain: Critical Reading Sentence Completion, and Analogies. More than in the past, the new test depends upon visual critical thinking skills and vocabulary. Its context base makes the test both more fair, and in some respects, easier.
Critical Reading and The Reasoning Process
Both subtext and the reasoning processes of induction and deduction play a big part in the verbal sections of the SAT. More than simply reading for solid content understanding, the student needs to be able to see the intention of the test writers as they use research into the text and the reasoning processes to measure how a student can see answers from more than one perspective. Not a test of student knowledge the Verbal SAT asks students to choose among five answers for 78 verbal questions by eliminating partially true, often superficially accurate, answers which, however, do not address the author's intent or the perspective that the ETS has based its questioning upon.
Vocabulary
Taken our of "antonym" exercise, vocabulary now has much more emphasis in all three exercises. Learning vocabulary words works very well with mnemonic devices (memory tricks) because humans picture images. On a regular basis, this site will change vocabulary words offering you mnemonic images from Ameliorate, a vocabulary book work-in-progress.
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