ACT Tutor Tip #4: The Shortest Answer Is Usually the Best
The ACT doesn't write any of the English passages themselves. Take advantage of that fact. (Photo Credit: Nic's events via Flickr)
Hey Albuquerque Students!
The December ACT is tomorrow! So we'd better finish our series on the Four Advantages so that you can all rock the English section. Fortunately, we only have one more to go, and this should wrap English up. So without further ado:
Advantage #4: The Shortest Answer is Usually the Best
While the Golden Ear is fantastic and will do a lot to help you find the correct answers, it does have a big problem. Like we talked about
last time, because of the fluid nature of the English language, it's not uncommon for two or more answers choices to sound right to your Golden Ear. So,
whenever you find yourself facing multiple answer choices that each look like they could be correct, go with whichever one is the shortest.
Since the ACT does not write any of the passages in the test, they must come from someplace else; and regardless of where that other place was, the one commonality is that all passages used by the ACT have been previously published. What the ACT has to do is take mistake-free passages and then adds in mistakes. So by choosing the shortest answer, you're limiting the ACT's opportunities to throw any additional mistakes into the sentence.
Going back to our trusty sample sentence, we can see this in action:
Yet, throughout my life I always had wonder why he had chosen to give it up when I was born.
A. NO CHANGE
B. had wondered
C. wondered
D. was wondering
In case you don't remember what we talked about for the Golden Ear, we decided that since the sentence didn't make any sense either as written or when we substitute answer D, that neither of those choices could be right. However, that left us with both answers B. and C. as possible. Now, since everything else is equal, what we should do is look at which answer is shortest and go with that. So, for this question, we'd pick C. wondered and we'd be correct.
And that wraps up the Four Advantages! While we have many more in-depth techniques for English, these Four Advantages are the foundation of our ACT tutoring for this section. A good understanding of the Advantages will most definitely help to improve your score!
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