Omniac Attack!

Hey Students!

We're continuing our series on the Four Advantages for the English section.  Last time, we talked about our first Advantage, where Mistakes are Underlined and how understanding that fact will save students time on the test.  Today though, we're going to look at our second Advantage, which ties in very closely to the first.  

This Advantage may seem a bit obvious or redundant to some of you.  The ACT is a multiple choice test, so of course the answers are provided!  But the fact that this test is multiple choice can actually be a huge benefit, and unfortunately, many students overlook that fact.  As we said last time, the majority of the English section doesn't really ask any questions.  It just gives you an underlined part of a passage and you have to decided how to make that the most grammatically correct.  It's not always easy to find the most grammatically correct answer, and in fact, it's also not always easy to tell what's even wrong with the section.  This is where having the answer choices listed really comes in handy.  If you can't tell what's wrong with the question you're on, look at the answer choices and find what changes from one answer to the others.  That's what will be wrong with the question.

To give an example, consider these answer choices that correspond with the sentence:

Once we look at our answer choices, it becomes very clear that the thing that changes is the tense of the the verb, wonder.  So we don't have to pay attention to anything else but that.  Another important thing to look for is groupings.  If you can put answer choices into two distinct groups, then once you eliminate one answer, you can often eliminate others as well.  In the above example, we know that both A. and D. are in the present tense, and B. and C. are in the past tense.  By looking at the word chosen we can tell that the sentence should be past tense and can eliminate both A. and D.  The correct answer here is C., but even if you have a question where you can't quite get all the way to the right answer, you can still help yourself out by narrowing your possible guesses.  

Together with Advantage #1, which we looked at last time, keying in on the answer choices and seeing all the hints that they give you will definitely an edge on English.  But we still have half of the Advantages left to give you.  So check back in a few days when we go over Advantage #3.