Welcome to Pacing and Guessing Strategies for the Reading Section. You are gonna encounter the reading section right after your break. So hopefully you will be a little bit perkier, you'll have a little bit of sugar rushing through your system. The way it goes, of course, is English, math, break, the reading, science, but 35 minutes, you have 40 questions.

And you're always gonna see 4 passages, and you're always gonna get 1 fiction, 1 social science, 1 humanities and 1 natural science. Each of these is gonna have 10 questions, so I'm not gonna say too much more about that, just know that that's the general overview. Tackle the most interesting passage first, and also the hardest passage last. And what a lot of tutors say is you should go for the easiest passage first, the hardest last, which, it's similar.

A lot of times, the ones we find most interesting also are the ones we find to be the easiest, but I think that interesting is really the key word. What I've noticed is that the reading section, above all the other sections, it's the one that takes the most discipline to stay interested in, it's really easy to get bored in this section. And so if you start with the interesting passage, what we know from studying many, many test-takers is that students do better if they start with what's most interesting.

So that's my first step, and let me show you how I would do that. So I just looked through a sample exam and I took about, not long, less than 30 seconds. So I saw that for fiction, we have archers, social science, political philosophers. Humanities, we've got a piece on costumes in the movies, and for our natural sciences, we have Planet X and Pluto.

And so from my perspective, I decided that this one sounded the most interesting. Usually, these two are the ones that I find the most interesting and the easiest. But in this case, I actually chose this one as the last one I want to do, this one looks hard to me, it doesn't look all that interesting. So I'm gonna start with the humanities one, I'm gonna end with social science, and I'm not gonna really care that much about what's second or what's third between these.

Okay, so now that i have looked at these, I've chosen my order, where do I start? And the big question always is, do you start with the questions, or do you start with the passage? I feel like it's okay to scan your questions first, if you would like to, but you should always read the passage before you start answering the questions. I'm going to start by reading the passage, but I'm going to read the passage in a very specific way.

I, because this works for me, my approach is to read the first and the last paragraphs first, and do it slowly. And so my order here would be kind of to start up here, I usually don't even read this first part. I would read this first paragraph at normal speed, and then I would jump over here and I would read the last paragraph at normal speed.

And the reason I do it that way is because the most important points are often found in the introduction and the conclusion. It's when I've the most discipline to focus, so I want my top focusing energy to be on those two sections. And also, it give me kind of a sense of where we're gonna be going, it's almost a little bit of a road map.

And so for these paragraphs, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, I'm gonna skim. I'll do a little underlining, maybe a little annotating, and that's my process. One other technique I use, a lot of students just do it kind of automatically, is use your paper or your Scantron to guide your eyes as you read. This is what we would normally see, we go, we're ready to read, we start reading, and okay, it looks doable.

But really, I'm looking at this right now from a psychology point of view, there are too many words. The words are too close together, we're trying to take in too much information at once. And so, like I said, a lot of students do this naturally, it can be really good to use your Scantron to help guide your eyes.

Now when I'm saying this, of course, I'm referring to when you actually take the exam in real life. When you're reading the screen, and doing your practice problems, you can try out some different ways to try to guide your eyes, to really just focus in on a few sentences at a time. And I do like to have a little bit of a space here.

So If I'm reading the first line, I want a couple-line space, so that I can do some highlighting or note-taking if I want to. And then you just constantly kinda keep your Scantron sliding down at an even rate. And if you watch my lesson on focus, you'll see that this also fits along with my philosophy that you focus better if you're doing a little bit of movement.

A little bit of movement with your hands can be really good for keeping you focused. But what about the question-answering? Well, number 4, here I say, practice pre-phrasing. I want you to learn how to anticipate or answer the question before you look at the options, and this can take some discipline.

I feel it takes discipline for me, when I'm working with students, just to constantly slap my hand down and try and cover up the answer choices. So if you can start doing this on your own while you're studying, it's going to tune your mind, and I'll show you an example of this. And it says, according to the passage, which of the following statements is true about the film's costumes during the party years of Marie Antoinette, as compared to her previous dresses?

And I have something here, maybe it's an eraser or something, just covering up my answers. So I can ask myself and I would say, well, it's her party years, they talked about desert colors. They said when she was young, she was wearing these light blue, frosty, icy colors, and then she went desert, and then she went dark.

And so I also remember they said something about how she was kind of wearing these edgy clothes. And so those would be some of the, that's not a very sophisticated, concise answer. But those would be some of the thoughts that would be generating in my mind as I try and answer the question, without the options visible. Then I remove the eraser, and I always eliminate as I go.

Lighter in color, no, that's what they said about her very first phase of clothes, are they mature? Well, kind of, maybe, I mean, I can sort of see that, I'll keep that open as an option, are they more daring? Well, yeah, kinda, I mean, I said edgy, yeah, I would have to keep that open as an option also.

And then last, are they more autumn-like in shade? No, they did not describe them as autumn-like in shade. That sounds more like how they describe the third period of her costume life in the movies. So at this point, I really need to go back to the passage. And that is my fifth tip, is don't rely on your memory, consult the passage.

My guideline for you here is that you get five times per test where you don't have to go back to the passage, five times for that section. Okay, so you've got 40 questions, 35 times I want you to go back to the passage. And so when I read, I find here it says, line 55, her dresses are modified in configuration as well, become bolder. And more, here's the word, the exact word, more daring, more daring garnish.

Now, I didn't even remember the word daring was in there, and for all I knew, the word mature was in there. So I really had to go back, even though I read it pretty well, I understood what they were asking. And you know this, I know that you know how to do this. I'm just really pointing it out because I see students, over and over again, rely on their memory and get the wrong answer.

So let's talk just a little bit about pacing. My top tip for pacing on the reading section is to budget 8-9 minutes total per passage, and that's to both read and answer the questions. And for a lot of you, that's gonna be enough guidance. But for those of you who like more fine-tuned advice, I would say, aim for 3-4 minutes to read, and then 5 minutes to answer.

You'll find that it goes quickly, 3-4 minutes is a little bit of a push, and you do want as much time as you can to spend on the questions. If you wanted to break it down by the level of each individual question, I would say aim for around 40 seconds. And even more importantly, if a question takes longer than 60 seconds, just skip it, and you can return later.

You can return at the end of that passage, or at the end of this section. And last, let's talk about some guessing strategies. If you've listened to my other videos on pacing, I'm gonna sound like a broken record. But the best strategy by far is to just eliminate wrong answers, and then use intuition to guess.

And if you want me to do it, a lesson on intuition, let me know and I'll do that, I've been using that word kind of loosely. And it occurs to me, as I'm recording this lesson, that maybe it would be helpful for me to do a little lesson on the difference between knowledge and intuition. If you really are in a pinch, and you don't know, you're out of time, you have to make some quick decisions?

Two things to keep in mind is that for questions about the main point, or the author's point, the main point is often in the introduction for both the social and natural sciences. And the main point is often found in the conclusion for humanities and fiction. So this is our Marie Antoinette humanities passage. It just so happens that the last paragraph here does tell us what the main point is, it's right here at the end.

The costumes conspire with the other cinematic features, generating a symbolic network for telling a story through dress. If you had to guess, and you just narrowed in on one paragraph here, you would have a pretty good shot at getting that correct. Also, always keep in mind that guessing strategies give you confidence, but the best game plan is to learn this stuff and to practice.

I think the reading section in particular, the reading and the science, those are practice, you just wanna do a lot of these. You wanna do them under time conditions. I know 35 minutes is a daunting amount of time to sit down and do four of these, so do one. Take out a timer, put it on for nine minutes, do one passage.

And if you were to do that five times a week, you'd be in a really, really great rhythm, and you would have accrued a lot of practice time.