<p>I’ve come to really like the SAT’s trickiness on math problems to where you think of an answer immediately and it’s one of the answer choices just waiting to be circled. On a few practice tests, I almost never get fooled because you know they’re trying to trick you. Say on a probability problem of what is the probability that 3 out 27 students will have their birthdays in the same months.</p>
<p>I immediately looked to 1/9 but you can always be assured when you think of an answer within seconds of a Medium or Hard math question. Most people answer 1/9 and move on without thinking what if there were 1 billion months, would that matter? In the end the probability is 1 and most people wouldn’t even think considering how many students versus the # of months. On CR it’s a little harder even though you can eliminate extreme choices and things that aren’t mentioned.</p>
<p>I like the birthday paradox question. However, SAT questions are never this difficult. The trickiest problem I’ve ever seen was something like this.</p>
<p>10^33 - 10^8 is approximately
A. 10^25
B. 10^41
C. …
D …
E. 10^33</p>
<p>The answer is E, but very few people would pick E because you can’t take something away from something else and have that something else remain the same.</p>
<p>That problem still doesn’t make sense. If saw that problem, I would take it down with my TI-84 plus by doing (10)^33 -(10)^8, exactly as you had it, and I don’t know what you would get but it should be in scientific notation on your calculator. That’s like saying 2^3-2^2, well, it’s simple, 8-4=4, and 4 is not 2^3. Was that question you had a real SAT question on the Hard section?</p>
<p>lol I blew through the SAT math in 5 minutes. I took a nap for the next 20 minutes. =D</p>
<p>as for the trickyness, indeed some of the questions can be tricky. for CR and W though, I found that if I just thought of an answer to that question first, it worked much better than if I didn’t and just looked at the answer choices. THEN it would confuse me and deceive me.</p>