Strategies for SAT II Biology

This hint goes hand in hand with the last one. In fact, this hint provides a method to stop yourself from speeding through the test carelessly. Imagine the hasty student who read the last example question too quickly and thought that the sodium concentration was higher inside the cell than outside. The hasty student, of course, doesn’t realize this error and looks through the answers. And there sits choice A, which is the right answer based on the information lodged in the hasty test taker’s head. So the hasty test taker answers A and continues on her way, having lost points she should have gotten.

But if the hasty test taker had instead tried to answer the question without looking at the answers, she wouldn’t have been so hasty. Instead, she would have had to stop for a second and look at the information in the question a second time; then she would have sorted everything out and gotten the question right. If you force yourself to answer the question before looking at the answer choices, you force yourself to come to grips with the question and therefore will cut down on the careless errors you might normally make.

Pace Yourself

At the very least, aim to at least look at every question on the test. You can’t afford to lose points because you didn’t find the time to look at a question you could have easily answered. You can spend an average of forty-eight seconds on each question, though you’ll probably breeze through some in ten seconds and dwell on others for two minutes. Knowing how to pace yourself is a critical skill—these three guidelines should help:

If you’ve spent a couple of minutes laboring over the question, you might just want to make a note of it and move on. If you feel the answer is on the tip of your tongue, it might come more easily if you just let it rest and come back to it later. Not only is it demoralizing to spend five minutes on a single question, but it also eats up precious time in which you might have answered a number of easier questions.

Nail the easy questions

As we said in the previous chapter, the test questions get progressively harder as you go along. Nonetheless, there will be some tough ones thrown in right at the start, and you’ll be finding gimmes right up until the end. One of the reasons you don’t want to dwell too long on tough questions is to ensure that you get a look at all the questions and snatch up the easy ones. Remember: you get as many points for correctly answering an easy question as a difficult one. You get a lot more points for five quickly answered easy questions than one hard-earned victory.

Skip the unfamiliar

If you encounter a question you can’t make heads or tails of, just skip it. Don’t sweat too hard trying to sort out what’s going on. If you have time at the end, you can come back to it and see if you can make an educated guess. Your first priority should be to get all the easy questions, and your second priority should be to work through the questions you can solve with difficulty. Unfamiliar material should be at the bottom of your list of priorities.

Grid Your Answers Carefully

No kidding. People make mistakes while entering their answers into the grid, and it can cost them big-time. This slipup occurs most frequently after you skip a question. If you left question 43 blank and then unthinkingly put the answer to question 44 into row 43, you could be starting a long, painful chain of wrong answers. Don’t do this.

Some test prep books advise that you fill in your answer sheet five questions at a time rather than one at a time. Some suggest that you fill out each oval as you answer the question. We think you should fill out the answer sheet whatever way feels most natural to you; just make sure you’re careful while doing it. In our opinion, the best way to ensure that you’re being careful is to talk silently to yourself. As you go from the test booklet to the answer sheet ovals, say to yourself: “Number 23, B. Number 24, E, number 25, A.”

We’ve already said that if you can eliminate one answer in a question, the scoring odds are in your favor, and you should guess. This means that you shouldn’t skip a question juts because you realize you don’t know the right answer. Before skipping any question, check to see if you can at least eliminate an answer. For every question, you should go through a checklist of priorities:

• First priority: Answer the question correctly.
• Second priority: If you don’t know the answer, try to eliminate answer choices and then guess.
• Third priority: If you can’t eliminate any answer choices, move on to the next question.

On most questions, there will be at least one or two answer choices you can eliminate. There are also certain styles of question that lend themselves to particular processes of elimination.

The weakness of classification questions is that the same five answer choices apply to several questions. Invariably, some of these answer choices will be tempting for some questions, but not for others.

Questions 1–3 relate to the following molecules:

1. phospholipid
2. carbohydrate
3. protein
4. DNA
5. RNA

• 1. Contains the nitrogenous base uracil
• 2. Acts as storage for long strings of sugars
• 3. One side is hydrophilic, while the other is hydrophobic

For instance, you can be pretty sure that uracil doesn’t appear in protein, carbohydrates, or phospholipids, since nitrogenous bases are only found in RNA and DNA.

Another point that may help you guess in a pinch: you’ll rarely find the same answer choice being correct for two different questions. True, the directions for classification questions explicitly state that an answer choice “may be used once, more than once, or not at all,” but on the whole, the ETS people shy away from the “more than once” possibility. This is by no means a sure bet, but if you’re trying to eliminate answers, you might want to eliminate those choices that you’ve already used on other questions in the same set.

If you’re wondering, the answers to the above questions are 1 E, 2 B, and 3 A. Don’t worry if you didn’t know these answers. After reading this book, you will. The same goes for the following example questions.

“EXCEPT” Questions

“EXCEPT” questions are five-choice multiple-choice questions that contain a bunch of right answers and one wrong answer. The questions always contain an all-caps EXCEPT, LEAST, or some other, similar word. Even if you aren’t sure of the answer (which is actually the wrong answer), you should be able to identify one or two of the answer choices as true statements and eliminate them.

Most birds are characterized by all of the following EXCEPT

1. four-chambered heart
2. strong, heavy bones
3. powerful lungs
4. eggs protected by hard shells
5. evolved from reptiles

Perhaps you’re not sure which of the five answer choices is wrong. But you should be able to identify that birds do lay eggs protected by shells and that they evolved from dinosaurs. Already, you’ve eliminated two possible answers and can make a pretty good guess from there.

If you’re interested, the answer is B: the bones of birds are extremely light. Heavy bones would make flight much more difficult for birds.

“I, II, and III” Questions

“I, II, and III” questions are multiple-choice questions that provide you with three possible answers, and the five answer choices list different combinations of those three.

A population of animals is split in two by the formation of a river through their territory. The two populations gain different characteristics due to the different natures of their new habitats. When the river disappears, the two populations can no longer interbreed. What has occurred?

1. Natural selection
2. Convergent evolution
3. Speciation

• 1. I only
• 2. II only
• 3. I and III only
• 4. II and III only
• 5. I, II, and III

There’s an upside and a downside to questions like this. Suppose you know that the scenario described by this question does involve speciation, but you aren’t sure about natural selection or convergent evolution. The downside is that you can’t get the right answer for sure. The upside is that you can eliminate A and B and significantly increase your chance of guessing the right answer. As long as you’re not afraid to guess—and you should never be afraid to guess if you’ve eliminated an answer—these questions shouldn’t be daunting. By the way, the answer is C: changes in organisms’ characteristics due to changes in habitat are a result of natural selection, and the inability of the members of a former population to interbreed after being separated for a long time is speciation.