<p>Can anyone tell me get better at answering the type of questions which ask about the author’s attitude?</p>
<p>tone questions are fairly easy to answer if u know what the author is arguing about. usually when u get the idea of the author’s argument,u can fairly tell he’s positive or negative toward the argument.
its easy to eliminate half of them.
usually its either + or -
say, appreciation vs indifference,
objective, irate, these are fairly easy to detect if u pay attention to the wordings of the author’s opening argument.</p>
<p>err it’s 2 words… and it’s like, grudging acceptance, or contempt liking… idk i just get confused by the answer choices.</p>
<p>Let me just make up an example here and hopefully this might help. </p>
<p>Say you have this passage: </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>So like, say your question asked what the author’s attitude was, and your answer choices are:
a) contemptuous disapproval
b) excited interest
c) neutral curiosity
d) youthful nostalgia
e) grudging acceptance </p>
<p>You have to both look at the key phrases which indicate how the author feels about the subject and then at the very end decide on an overall attitude. In this instance, you find out in the second sentence that this is a mother watching her son’s performance at what can be inferred to be a rowdy, mosh-pit style rock concert. Her question about what her “intelligent son” is doing here indicates that she feels he doesn’t belong; presumably she has higher hopes for him than this. How she describes the audience, furthermore, indicates that she is largely disdainful of this kind of environment. But at the very end she notes that he enjoys this, which seems to be infrequent, since the tell-tale “glimpse of contentment” is “something rare”. She leaves the concert herself but notes that she thinks he would be “okay” and “fine without [her]”. </p>
<p>Go through your answer choices. Contemptuous disapproval would be incorrect since, while she is contemptuous and initially may have disapproved, the conclusion of the passage suggests that she’s come to terms with her son’s choice, at least to some degree. Excited interest is incorrect, because she’s said nothing to indicate excitement or even interest, besides maybe in her son. Neutral curiosity would be incorrect; she is clearly not neutral, since she obviously dislikes the concert, and nothing in the passage indicates curiosity. Youthful nostalgia is also irrelevant, since the passage is about her watching her son now and says nothing about her background. Grudging acceptance is the right answer in this instance; she is reluctant to approve something she finds distasteful, but ultimately, because she senses that her son enjoys it, she leaves the concert feeling “overwhelmed and tired” but noting that her son would be fine without her. She accepts his choice, but does so begrudgingly.</p>
<p>Break down your answer choices to understand what kind of feelings they would indicate. If they seem to be contradictory, your tone is probably going to be more measured, and it would be more obvious if both the terms indicate the same kind of feeling (“lazy excitement”, for instance, probably wouldn’t sound as !!! as “overwhelming excitement”). Then look at how the author describes things in the passage, looking for positive and negative words, to figure out the author’s overall attitude. Try to flesh out an idea of the person speaking.</p>
<p>lol wow that was longggg XD Hope that helped.</p>
<p>^ Wow, that’s really good.
But in the actual SAT tests, would the key words be that obvious to indicate?</p>
<p>Eh, probably not. Although either way I think you’d primarily be looking at the kinds of adjectives the author uses to describe the subject. Maybe excessive sarcasm could indicate mockery and/or condescension. Meticulous attention to detail could indicate great care. </p>
<p>I really think these are some of the trickier CR questions, but the way CB seems to justify their answers is really methodical. I usually got the general gist of the passages, but sometimes I would waver between two answers that I thought were equally valid. In those instances I think you’d just have to pretend you’re CB and attempt to justify both with direct text references. I remember a PSAT question I got wrong, where I was dithering between two choices regarding a character’s mentality or something and ended up choosing one that referred to her vanity. Even though I had gotten that kind of feeling from the passage, CB’s justification was that there was nothing about vanity in the passage. The wrong answers are either going to be just flat-out wrong and contrary, or they might seem possible to a reader but ultimately can’t be definitively supported by textual evidence. So the key phrases might not be that obvious, but they should be obvious enough, and they should almost definitely be there.</p>