How is one to hone in on a answer choice when the excerpt is large and uses ambiguous language?

Question

Answering questions with large passages can at times confuse students. One strategy I've developed is reading and understanding the questions prior to reading the passage.

Answer 1

On the new Digital SAT, you don’t have to wrestle with long passages anymore — every text is just a few sentences with one question attached. That change makes strategy even more important:

1. Read the question first. Identify whether it’s asking for evidence, word meaning, or purpose.
2. Find the clue, not the whole story. With short passages, the correct answer will be anchored to one specific phrase or sentence.
3. Eliminate carefully. If even part of a choice can’t be proven by the text, it’s wrong — no matter how tempting it looks.

In other words, when the language feels ambiguous, the key is to ground yourself in the exact evidence from the passage. I train students to practice this in Bluebook (the official SAT app) so they get used to spotting and confirming answers under test timing.

Answer 2

one method is do all the easiest (fastest) questions first

also the other questions may give clues as to answers in the more difficult time consuming questions.

right after the long quesiton, there may be short questions that actually indicate the answer to the long question.

or if not, at least you now have more time to work on the time consuming questions, or if not, and you've run out of time, you still answered more questions this way and more likely got them answered correctly

Answer 3

The fundamental idea of the SAT Reading section is that it assumes no background knowledge. A test taker's ambiguity during the Reading section is usually caused by their background knowledge of the reading's topic, which causes them to recognize more than one answer as plausible.

To counteract this issue, a test taker must realize that all information asked in the questions will come from the readings. Strictly referencing the readings as a source, rather than also attempting to call upon previous knowledge to try and infer a correct answer choice, should help reduce ambiguity (it did for me!)

I have an extensive SAT tutoring background and got a 1580 on the exam (800/800 Math, 780/800 EBRW). Additionally, I have years of writing and proofreading experience. If you are interested in SAT tutoring, please feel free to contact me; I'd be happy to connect!

Best,

Ayush