Guía gratuita del SAT Reading 2020 (con ejemplos)

La prueba de lectura o sección Reading del examen SAT en 2020 contiene 52 preguntas de selección múltiple que deberás completar en 65 minutos, más allá de tus aciertos o desaciertos. Los pasajes se subdividen en individuales y dobles sobre cinco tópicos en general: documentos históricos, ciencias naturales, ciencias sociales y literatura. Bastantes genéricos, ¿cierto? Esto quiere decir que los textos de este apartado de la prueba pueden tratarse sobre casi cualquier cosa. 

Pero no te preocupes, este hecho no significa que debes ser un genio para sacar una excelente puntuación en el test de SAT en Madrid. Lo que sí o sí tienes que poseer entre tus habilidades es la comprensión del idioma inglés, de modo que te sea posible afrontar cada parte del examen exitosamente.

Una de las características del SAT Reading –y de todas sus otras secciones- es que no requieres en ningún caso consultar fuentes alternativas de información. Lo único que necesitas para hallar las respuestas correctas es el material o contenido suministrado por la prueba. Recuerda que “Reading” se desprende del apartado Evidence-based Reading and Writing, sección principal que desde 2016 unificó en un solo bloque los test de lectura y de escritura. 

Todo lo que debes saber de la prueba de lectura del SAT 2020 (con ejemplos)

La esencia del Reading dentro del SAT

Básicamente, en la prueba de lectura los aplicantes experimentarán preguntas sobre una discusión que podría realizarse en el high school, sea dentro del aula de clases u otro escenario. Estas discusiones se basan en elementos que incitan el pensamiento crítico, siendo indispensable el apoyo en ejemplos o evidencia factible para validar la respuesta a favor o en contra de lo que se discute. 

Si en el bachillerato fuiste un estudiante aplicado y responsable con las asignaciones, entonces el SAT Reading será pan comido para ti, pues se trata precisamente de eso, de todo o que aprendiste en dicha etapa escolar. Ni más ni menos. 

Como te revelamos arriba, a diferencia de otras secciones, en Reading todas las preguntas son de selección múltiple y toda la información la obtendrás únicamente de pasajes de lectura –textos-. La excepción a la norma es que algunos pasajes pueden contener gráficos, tablas o carteleras con información complementaria que puede ser importante para dar con la respuesta correcta. 

En las entrañas de los pasajes de lectura

Aunque los modelos aplicables de prueba del SAT 2020 en Madrid varían, existe un patrón fijo que nunca se modifica en la parte de Reading, referente al contenido de los pasajes de lectura. ¿Te gustaría conocerlo? En esta guía gratuita de SAT 2020 te lo revelamos a continuación. La sección Reading del SAT en 2020 siempre contendrá:

-1 pasaje sobre una obra de la literatura estadounidense o mundial, que podría ser clásica o contemporánea. 

-1 pasaje sobre un documento fundacional de una nación o afines. Por ejemplo, un discurso de una figura política mediática, un fragmento de la constitución de EE UU, entre otros. Este pasaje puede ser individual o doble.

-1 pasaje sobre sociología, psicología, economía u otra asignatura de ciencias sociales. 

-2 pasajes sobre ciencias de la tierra, biología, física o química. Estos pasajes pueden ser individuales o dobles. 

Lo que se evalúa en la prueba de lectura

Como lo verás detalladamente en el curso de SAT en Madrid de EXAM Madrid Academy, las habilidades que se evalúan en la sección Reading del test son:

-Comando de evidencia

Para que lo entiendas de la manera más simple, te lo explicaremos por premisas. En Comando de evidencia tu tarea es: encontrar evidencia en un pasaje individual o pasajes dobles; identificar de qué manera el autor del texto hace uso de la evidencia para apoyar sus afirmaciones, y encontrar una relación o conexión lógica entre pasajes de lectura y la información que los complementan (gráficos, tablas y carteleras). 

-Palabras en contexto

Seguimos con la tónica de premisas. En Palabras en contexto tu tarea es: utilizar pistas o indicadores basados en el contexto de una frase para precisar el significado de la misma y  determinar si se está utilizando de manera correcta. También deberás decidir de qué manera dichas frases están estructuradas en cuanto a tono, significado y estilo de redacción. Con base a estas indicaciones es que deberás elegir la respuesta correcta entre las alternativas disponibles. 

-Análisis de historia, ciencia y estudios sociales

No son más que los tópicos a tratar, como el título lo indica: historia, ciencia y estudios sociales. De estos temas se trata el contenido de los textos. Tu tarea es examinar hipótesis arrojadas por el autor, interpretar los datos y considerar las implicaciones de todos estos casos. Las respuestas se enfocan exclusivamente en el contenido que se arroja de forma implícita o explícita en los pasajes de lectura. 

Las instrucciones reveladas

Seguimos descubriendo y explorando el SAT Reading. Ahora llega el momento de dar un vistazo a las instrucciones de la prueba de lectura en nuestra guía gratuita de SAT, ya que es uno de los métodos más efectivos para que te sientas familiarizado con las condiciones reales del test, tal y como lo experimentarás en los simulacros en tiempo real que te aplicamos en los cursos de SAT en Madrid. 

Instructions

Turn to Section 1 of your answer sheet to answer the questions in this section.

Each passage or pair of passages below is followed by a number of questions. After reading each passage or pair, choose the best answer to each question based on what is stated or implied in the passage or passages and in any accompanying graphics (such as a table or graph).

Como puedes ver, las instrucciones indican que verás tanto pasajes individuales como pasajes emparejados o dobles, seguidos de una serie de preguntas. Luego de leer cada pasaje, deberás escoger la respuesta a cada pregunta, basándote en lo que se dice de forma explícita (directa) o implícita (indirecta), incluyendo la información complementaria que puede presentarse mediante gráficos, tablas o carteleras. 

Ahora veamos algunos ejemplos de preguntas pertenecientes a la sección Reading del examen de SAT en Madrid: 

Ejemplo 1: 

Questions 1-5 are based on the following passage.

This passage is adapted from Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome, originally published in 1911. Mattie Silver is Ethan’s household employee.

Mattie Silver had lived under Ethan’s roof for a year, and from early morning till they met at supper he had frequent chances of seeing her; but no moments in her company were comparable to those when, her arm in his, and her light step flying to keep time with his long stride, they walked back through the night to the farm. He had taken to the girl from the first day, when he had driven over to the Flats to meet her, and she had smiled and waved to him from the train, crying out, “You must be Ethan!” as she jumped down with her bundles, while he reflected, looking over her slight person: “She don’t look much on housework, but she ain’t a fretter, anyhow.” But it was not only that the coming to his house of a bit of hopeful young life was like the lighting of a fire on a cold hearth. The girl was more than the bright serviceable creature he had thought her. She had an eye to see and an ear to hear: he could show her things and tell her things, and taste the bliss of feeling that all he imparted left long reverberations and echoes he could wake at will.

It was during their night walks back to the farm that he felt most intensely the sweetness of this communion. He had always been more sensitive than the people about him to the appeal of natural beauty. His unfinished studies had given form to this sensibility and even in his unhappiest moments field and sky spoke to him with a deep and powerful persuasion. But hitherto the emotion had remained in him as a silent ache, veiling with sadness the beauty that evoked it. He did not even know whether any one else in the world felt as he did, or whether he was the sole victim of this mournful privilege. Then he learned that one other spirit had trembled with the same touch of wonder: that at his side, living under his roof and eating his bread, was a creature to whom he could say: “That’s Orion down yonder; the big fellow to the right is Aldebaran, and the bunch of little ones—like bees swarming—they’re the Pleiades…” or whom he could hold entranced before a ledge of granite thrusting up through the fern while he unrolled the huge panorama of the ice age, and the long dim stretches of succeeding time. The fact that admiration for his learning mingled with Mattie’s wonder at what he taught was not the least part of his pleasure. And there were other sensations, less definable but more exquisite, which drew them together with a shock of silent joy: the cold red of sunset behind winter hills, the flight of cloud-flocks over slopes of golden stubble, or the intensely blue shadows of hemlocks on sunlit snow. When she said to him once: “It looks just as if it was painted!” it seemed to Ethan that the art of definition could go no farther, and that words had at last been found to utter his secret soul….

As he stood in the darkness outside the church these memories came back with the poignancy of vanished things. Watching Mattie whirl down the floor from hand to hand he wondered how he could ever have thought that his dull talk interested her. To him, who was never gay but in her presence, her gaiety seemed plain proof of indifference. The face she lifted to her dancers was the same which, when she saw him, always looked like a window that has caught the sunset. He even noticed two or three gestures which, in his fatuity, he had thought she kept for him: a way of throwing her head back when she was amused, as if to taste her laugh before she let it out, and a trick of sinking her lids slowly when anything charmed or moved her.

Select an Answer

Over the course of the passage, the main focus of the narrative shifts from the

A reservations a character has about a person he has just met to a growing appreciation that character has of the person’s worth.

B ambivalence a character feels about his sensitive nature to the character’s recognition of the advantages of having profound emotions.

C intensity of feeling a character has for another person to the character’s concern that that intensity is not reciprocated.

D value a character attaches to the wonders of the natural world to a rejection of that sort of beauty in favor of human artistry.

Respuesta correcta: opción “C”. 

Ejemplo 2: 

Questions 6–8 are based on the following passage and supplementary material.

This passage is adapted from Richard Florida, The Great Reset. ©2010 by Richard Florida.

In today’s idea-driven economy, the cost of time is what really matters. With the constant pressure to innovate, it makes little sense to waste countless collective hours commuting. So, the most efficient and productive regions are those in which people are thinking and working—not sitting in traffic.

The auto-dependent transportation system has reached its limit in most major cities and megaregions. Commuting by car is among the least efficient of all our activities—not to mention among the least enjoyable, according to detailed research by the Nobel Prize–winning economist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues. Though one might think that the economic crisis beginning in 2007 would have reduced traffic (high unemployment means fewer workers traveling to and from work), the opposite has been true. Average commutes have lengthened, and congestion has gotten worse, if anything. The average commute rose in 2008 to 25.5 minutes, “erasing years of decreases to stand at the level of 2000, as people had to leave home earlier in the morning to pick up friends for their ride to work or to catch a bus or subway train,” according to the U.S. Census Bureau, which collects the figures. And those are average figures. Commutes are far longer in the big West Coast cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco and the East Coast cities of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. In many of these cities, gridlock has become the norm, not just at rush hour but all day, every day.

The costs are astounding. In Los Angeles, congestion eats up more than 485 million working hours a year; that’s seventy hours, or nearly two weeks, of full-time work per commuter. In D.C., the time cost of congestion is sixty-two hours per worker per year. In New York it’s forty-four hours. Average it out, and the time cost across America’s thirteen biggest city-regions is fifty-one hours per worker per year. Across the country, commuting wastes 4.2 billion hours of work time annually—nearly a full workweek for every commuter. The overall cost to the U.S. economy is nearly $90 billion when lost productivity and wasted fuel are taken into account. At the Martin Prosperity Institute, we calculate that every minute shaved off America’s commuting time is worth $19.5 billion in value added to the economy. The numbers add up fast: five minutes is worth $97.7 billion; ten minutes, $195 billion; fifteen minutes, $292 billion.

It’s ironic that so many people still believe the main remedy for traffic congestion is to build more roads and highways, which of course only makes the problem worse. New roads generate higher levels of “induced traffic,” that is, new roads just invite drivers to drive more and lure people who take mass transit back to their cars. Eventually, we end up with more clogged roads rather than a long-term improvement in traffic flow.

The coming decades will likely see more intense clustering of jobs, innovation, and productivity in a smaller number of bigger cities and city-regions. Some regions could end up bloated beyond the capacity of their infrastructure, while others struggle, their promise stymied by inadequate human or other resources.

Adapted from Adam Werbach, “The American Commuter Spends 38 Hours a Year Stuck in Traffic.” ©2013 by The Atlantic.

Select an Answer

Which claim about traffic congestion is supported by the graph?

A New York City commuters spend less time annually delayed by traffic congestion than the average for very large cities.

B Los Angeles commuters are delayed more hours annually by traffic congestion than are commuters in Washington, D.C.

C Commuters in Washington, D.C., face greater delays annually due to traffic congestion than do commuters in New York City.

D Commuters in Detroit spend more time delayed annually by traffic congestion than do commuters in Houston, Atlanta, and Chicago.

Respuesta correcta: opción “C”.

¿Listo para comenzar a practicar? Cualquier duda que tengas, contáctanos y con gusto te ayudaremos. Y si quieres llevar tu preparación a otro nivel y tienes la posibilidad, te invitamos a apuntarte a un curso de SAT en Madrid. Explora las modalidades que te ofrecemos en EXAM Madrid Academy. Good luck!