Digital SAT English Cram Plan: Know These 3 Questions!

hey guys Laura here with STP if I was a student and I didn't have a lot of time to prep for the digital sat I would make sure I knew how to do these three questions in the digital sat English modules because they make up 65% of the points the three types of questions I'm talking about are transition Standard English convention and word and context questions so in this video I'm going to show you practical tips and strategies for how to tackle these three types of questions so you can maximize your points and minimize your

studying now if you want to work on these three categories even more then make sure you go to our website and download our digital sat workbook for free we're giving it away at no cost for limited time if you subscribe to our email list so I'm going to link up here to our website so you can go sign up today and get that workbook and get [Music] prepping [Music] all right first guys before we get started this video is brought to you by prep Le the fun digital SAT prep app that's available in the App

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level all right let's get started and talk about transition questions first transition questions start at around number 20 on each English module so they come right after the Standard English convention questions and right before the not taking questions there are roughly four to five transition questions per module so you're looking at like an extra 8 to 10 points now it's important to understand the different types of transition questions you will see to get good at this type of question I like to keep it simple and I put the transition words into four major categories the

first category is what's called supports a support transition essentially is a detail that backs up the main argument or the topic sentence of the paragraph for example words like also moreover in addition and likewise are all support words the second major category are contrast words contrast transitions essentially link two sentences and they go against each other so one sentence might be positive the other sentence might be negative common contrast transition words are however nevertheless and regardless the next major transition category you will encounter are called causation words causation words essentially uh evoke a a cause

and effect situation so the first sentence causes the second sentence to occur so some example causation words are thus therefore and consequently the last major category is what I like to call reinforcers reinforcers essentially are sentences that restate or reward the previous sentence in a different point so there's a three-step process for efficiently tackling transition questions the first step is when you get to the answer choices categorize them the second step is to read the sentence before the blank and the sentence that the blank is in to determine the relationship between them that way you'll

know what category transition word you need the third step and this is just a shortcut is to cross off any answer choices that come from the same category transition words so if you see two causation words that function the same exact way like thus and therefore cross them off because there's only one right answer in multiple choice all right what I'm going to do now is I'm going to work out a transition question with you so you can see these strategies and steps in action so as you can see we're on an example here and

the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to categorize these transition answer choices alternatively is a contrast but it's a specific type of contrast cuz it's really talking about different options like I might say I'll eat the steak alternatively I'll eat the chicken so if you're not sure what category a transition word goes into try to put it in a context and use it in a sentence and that'll help you determine what situation and what type it is consequently is a causation which makes perfect sense because we have the root scq which is

basically uh goes into the math term sequence if you think of about a math sequence it's one thing happening after another so consequently is something happening as a result of something else in fact is a reinforcer and moreover is a support okay I can't cross any off they're all from different categories now what I'm going to do is read the first sentence and the second sentence to determine a relationship so it says although TS Elliot devoted several years to writing the Wasteland it sold only about 330 copies in the 6 months following its publication that

word only tells me that that's a negative sentence I'm going to play positive negative and make a mental note okay that's a negative sentence now I'm going to read the second part Elliot was forced to seek other sources of income that also sounds negative to me so I know they're not going against each other it's not a contrast I'm going to cross off a this to me sounds just like a cause and effect situation because he only sold 330 copies he was forced to go seek other sources of income so I'm going to go with

the causation all right let's talk about Standard English convention questions now Standard English convention questions come at the very middle of the module around number 15 and you have about four to five standard English convention questions in each module as well which is another 8 to 10 points so I typically recommend to my students that they actually jump to number 15 and start with these when they get to a module because these are quick easy points if you know the rules there's very specific things that they test now in this digital sat you want to

get good at knowing the punctuation rules you want to get good at knowing how to place commas in the right spots and you want to get good at being able to link a subject to the right verb so I'm actually going to do a few examples with you right now to show you how to tackle these effectively the first example I'm going to show you guys deals with subjects verb agreement you'll know you're on a subject verb agreement question because the answer choices will all be different verb tenses so in this case I can see

is are have been and were those are verbs of being so you know verbs although they're typically action words like jump and run um these are also verbs as well so don't count these out it's very easy for students to mistake them for something else but these are verbs as well what I'm going to do is I'm going to read the sentence that the blank is in and I'm going to try to pinpoint my subject so it says for engineers the elimination of Sonic boom's blank one of the biggest challenges involved okay I know that

my subject is the elimination because of Sonic booms is just extra information describing more about the elimination anytime you see an of clause cross it off when you're on this type of question because that is not the subject it's the word that came right before it so it's a singular subject and when I read it the elimination is one of the biggest challenges now I know and I can validate that my answer is correct because another trick that you can use is to test singular plural and the answer choices this is the only singular tense

I can say he is right but I would say they are they have been and and they were so you want to find the one that's different and you want to find the only singular tense or the only plural tense cuz that's going to be the right one okay the next example I want to go over with you guys are comma placement questions CU these are huge on the digital sat so there's a big strategy that I like to use which is basically read the sentence and listen to where you pause that's probably where the

commas need to go you can also use the strategy of deter determining if something's essential or non essential let me highlight and show you what I mean by this example so it says aah love LA and her acquaintance Charles babage were two of the most influential figures okay already from the way that I read it out loud you could hear me read it without pausing so I'm already leaning towards picking B but if you weren't sure or you know you have your doubts what you can do essentially is like look at answer Choice a if

we put Charles babage in between two commas that would mean that that part is non essential if we took it out will the sentence still be okay and make sense if we said aah Lovel and her acquaintance were two of the most influential figures well now we're losing an important piece of information they gave her name so they should give his name too especially if they're influential that means they're important so we wouldn't be able to take his name out because then it wouldn't really give us the information that we need um so that's how

you can eliminate a and then C and C would be incorrect because you're not going to have uh it's very rare that you would have a comma right before the verb you don't pause before the verb if you have a subject and then a verb you read right through that and then if you look at D you wouldn't pause between acquaintance and Charles babage either so you can be confident in going with be again I would just keep it simple and read it out loud and Listen to If I need to pause or not and

at the end of the day if you're narrowed down to two and you're not sure which one to pick pick the one with less commas in it you'll have a better chance of picking up the point all right the last example I want to look at with you is dealing with what I call leadens and this is super super popular on the digital sat so you need to be aware of this this will be on your test now as you can see this example is from a paper test test but that doesn't matter it's still

the same on the digital sat I have basically an introduction to the sentence with a comma now here's a digital sat question so the way that you can pinpoint that you're on a lead in is if you see a comma and then the blank right after it chances are the part before it is a lead in and they're about to introduce the subject and what they're going to be talking about and that's exactly what a Leen does it warms you up and gets you ready to um to understand a little bit more about the subject

so if I say approaching a doorway in which dangles a red envelope filled with green paper money my subject has to come right after that here so your subject comes right after the leading and the subject has to be whatever was approaching a doorway so whatever they talked about in that lead in that is the subject well if we go go through our answer choices answer Choice a says the lion's teeth would it make sense for the lion's teeth to be approaching the doorway no that's not the subject would an envelope approach a doorway no

that's not the subject would the teeth of the lion approach the doorway no that's not the subject the only subject that makes sense here would be the lion because it's the only thing that would be approaching the doorway so that's how you tackle leadens all right guys the last type of question we are going to look at is what's called a words and context question so these come at the very beginning of the English modules and you're going to have roughly four to five words and context questions as well so that's another 8 to 10

points so as you can see these three categories really do make up most of the module now the challenge of words and context questions is a lot of students their vocabularies are weak maybe you're in that category if you are comment below for me me let me know what you think about your Lexicon do you have a strong lexicon do you have a weak lexicon if you didn't know lexicon meant vocabulary maybe you need to work on your vocabulary more but there are a few key strategies you can use even when you have a weak

vocabulary to still get the questions right so let's talk about those the first strategy is you can play positive negative so if you read the text and it sounds positive pick a positive sounding word the second strategy that you can use is linguistics words are comprised of Parts typically Latin and Greek Roots so if you know Roots prefixes and suffixes in their meanings for instance if I put the prefix a in front of a word it means without so apathy means without feelings that will help you figure out what words mean without memorizing thousands of

definitions your third strategy is to look for synonyms in the text there's going to be a definition somewhere in the text nearby especially after like an interesting punctuation mark like a colon or semicolon really look out for that okay so now I'm going to go over a words and context question with you just to show you how it works so I'm going to read this little paragraph first and try to play positive negative so it says since decades old regimens developed for the later stages of cancer uh have little success in the entire body focusing

on the first stages of cancer would be more effective and cheaper okay when I kind of get a sense of what's going on here with positive and negative the decades old regimens developed for later stages sound like bad so that is not good but they it sounds like they have a solution if you focus on the first stages it would be more effective and cheaper that sounds good it says thus professor of Medicine Dr AZ razza an international Authority on pre leukemia and Leukemia blank the traditional SL poison burn approach to treating cancer okay so

I need to figure out does this word need to be positive or negative here and I'm not really sure because there's a part of it in the text is positive and part of it is negative so what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to pinpoint the definition or a synonym to the word that I need in the blank now it's describing the traditional approach which is a synonym to a decade old regimen well the decade old regimen was negative right so I know I need a negative word in the blank well bolsters

sounds positive to me and it is reinforces sounds positive to me and it is would it make more sense for him to control or rebut rebut sounds more negative to me than controls controls kind of sounds neutral so I'm going to go with a so that's how you can get a word and context question right even if you don't know what all the words mean all right guys if you want to dive into these different types of questions even deeper we have an awesome digital sat English self-paced course so I'm going to link it up

here if you want to go check that out if you put in the promo code 50 off at checkout you can get $50 off this course since you are a YouTube viewer of mine and I love you guys so much all right that's it for now if you made it all the way to the end of this video comment below 65% with a brain Emoji I really appreciate you sticking it out with me to the very end and I have no doubt this STI intuitiveness of yours is going to help you succeed on your next

sat so until next time guys happy [Music] preing