SAT Skills Insight
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6/1
- Overview
- Reading
- Mathematics
- Writing
Select a score band
Author’s Craft
Skills needed to score in this band
SKILL 1: Analyze an author’s explicit and implicit purposes for writing
SKILL 2: Analyze the effects of an author’s rhetorical and stylistic choices
SKILL 3: Distinguish among opinion, fact, conjecture, and hypothesis in a text
SKILL 4: Recognize how an author uses evidence to support a particular position
SKILL 5: Recognize subtleties and differences in tone, such as the use of humor or irony to achieve a specific effect
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1
Analyze an author’s explicit and implicit purposes for writing
ExampleIn the following passage from a newspaper commentary written in 1968, an architecture critic discusses old theaters and concert halls.
View Passage
A reading passage Line Number Text After 50 years of life and 20 years of death, the great
Adler and Sullivan Auditorium in Chicago is back in
business again. Orchestra Hall, also in Chicago, was
beautifully spruced up for its sixty-eighth birthday. In
Line 5 St. Louis, a 1925 movie palace has been successfully
transformed into Powell Symphony Hall, complete with
handsome bar from New York’s demolished Metropolitan
Opera House.
Sentimentalism? Hardly. This is no more than a
Line 10 practical coming of cultural age, a belated recognition
that fine old buildings frequently offer the most for the
money in an assortment of values, including cost, and
above all, that new cultural centers do not a culture
make. It indicates the dawning of certain sensibilities,
Line 15 perspectives, and standards without which arts programs
are mockeries of everything the arts stand for.
The last decade has seen city after city rush pell-mell
into the promotion of great gobs of cultural real estate. It
has seen a few good new theaters and a lot of bad ones,
Line 20 temples to bourgeois muses with all the panache of sub-
urban shopping centers. The practice has been to treat the
arts in chamber-of-commerce, rather than in creative,
terms. That is just as tragic as it sounds.
The trend toward preservation is significant not only
Line 25 because it is saving and restoring some superior buildings
that are testimonials to the creative achievements of other
times, but also because it is bucking the conventional
wisdom of the conventional power structure that provides
the backing for conventional cultural centers to house the
Line 30 arts.
That wisdom, as it comes true-blue from the hearts and
minds of real estate dealers and investment bankers, is that
you don’t keep old buildings; they are obsolete. Anything
new is better than anything old and anything big is better
Line 35 than anything small, and if a few cultural values are lost
along the way, it is not too large a price to pay. In addition,
the new, big buildings must be all in one place so they will
show. They’ll not only serve the arts, they’ll improve the
surrounding property values. Build now, and fill them later.
Line 40 At the same time, tear down the past, rip out cultural
roots, erase tradition, rub out the architectural evidence that
the arts flowered earlier in our cities and enriched them and
that this enrichment is culture. Substitute a safe and sanitary
status symbol for the loss. Put up the shiny mediocrities of
Line 45 the present and demolish the shabby masterpieces of the
past. That is the ironic other side of the “cultural explosion”
coin. In drama, and in life, irony and tragedy go hand in
hand.
Chicago’s Auditorium is such a masterpiece. With its
Line 50 glowing, golden ambiance, its soaring arches and super-
stage from which whispers can be heard in the far reaches
of the theater, it became a legend in its own time. One of
the great nineteenth-century works of Louis Sullivan and
Dankmar Adler and an anchor point of modern architectural
Line 55 history, it has been an acknowledged model of acoustical
and aesthetic excellence. (Interestingly, the Auditorium is
a hard theater in which to install microphones today, and
many modern performers, untrained in balance and pro-
jection and reliant on technical mixing of sound, find it
Line 60 hard to function in a near-perfect house.)
Until October 1967, the last performance at the Auditor-
ium was of Hellzapoppin’ in 1941, and the last use of the
great stage was for bowling alleys during the Second World
War. Closed after that, it settled into decay for the next
Line 65 20 years. Falling plaster filled the hall, and the golden ceil-
ing was partly ruined by broken roof drains. Last fall the
Auditorium reopened, not quite in its old glory, but close
to it. The splendors of the house were traced in the eight-
candlepower glory of carbon-filament lightbulbs of the
Line 70 same kind used in 1889 when the theater, and electricity,
were new. Their gentle brilliance picked out restored archi-
tectural features in warm gilt and umber.
We have never had greater technical means or expertise
to make our landmarks bloom. The question is no longer
Line 75 whether we can bring old theaters back to new brilliance,
but whether we can fill them when they’re done. As with
the new centers, that will be the acid cultural test.
The description in lines 20–21 (“temples . . . centers”) best serves to
-
2
Analyze the effects of an author’s rhetorical and stylistic choices
ExampleIn the following passage from a newspaper commentary written in 1968, an architecture critic discusses old theaters and concert halls.
View Passage
A reading passage Line Number Text After 50 years of life and 20 years of death, the great
Adler and Sullivan Auditorium in Chicago is back in
business again. Orchestra Hall, also in Chicago, was
beautifully spruced up for its sixty-eighth birthday. In
Line 5 St. Louis, a 1925 movie palace has been successfully
transformed into Powell Symphony Hall, complete with
handsome bar from New York’s demolished Metropolitan
Opera House.
Sentimentalism? Hardly. This is no more than a
Line 10 practical coming of cultural age, a belated recognition
that fine old buildings frequently offer the most for the
money in an assortment of values, including cost, and
above all, that new cultural centers do not a culture
make. It indicates the dawning of certain sensibilities,
Line 15 perspectives, and standards without which arts programs
are mockeries of everything the arts stand for.
The last decade has seen city after city rush pell-mell
into the promotion of great gobs of cultural real estate. It
has seen a few good new theaters and a lot of bad ones,
Line 20 temples to bourgeois muses with all the panache of sub-
urban shopping centers. The practice has been to treat the
arts in chamber-of-commerce, rather than in creative,
terms. That is just as tragic as it sounds.
The trend toward preservation is significant not only
Line 25 because it is saving and restoring some superior buildings
that are testimonials to the creative achievements of other
times, but also because it is bucking the conventional
wisdom of the conventional power structure that provides
the backing for conventional cultural centers to house the
Line 30 arts.
That wisdom, as it comes true-blue from the hearts and
minds of real estate dealers and investment bankers, is that
you don’t keep old buildings; they are obsolete. Anything
new is better than anything old and anything big is better
Line 35 than anything small, and if a few cultural values are lost
along the way, it is not too large a price to pay. In addition,
the new, big buildings must be all in one place so they will
show. They’ll not only serve the arts, they’ll improve the
surrounding property values. Build now, and fill them later.
Line 40 At the same time, tear down the past, rip out cultural
roots, erase tradition, rub out the architectural evidence that
the arts flowered earlier in our cities and enriched them and
that this enrichment is culture. Substitute a safe and sanitary
status symbol for the loss. Put up the shiny mediocrities of
Line 45 the present and demolish the shabby masterpieces of the
past. That is the ironic other side of the “cultural explosion”
coin. In drama, and in life, irony and tragedy go hand in
hand.
Chicago’s Auditorium is such a masterpiece. With its
Line 50 glowing, golden ambiance, its soaring arches and super-
stage from which whispers can be heard in the far reaches
of the theater, it became a legend in its own time. One of
the great nineteenth-century works of Louis Sullivan and
Dankmar Adler and an anchor point of modern architectural
Line 55 history, it has been an acknowledged model of acoustical
and aesthetic excellence. (Interestingly, the Auditorium is
a hard theater in which to install microphones today, and
many modern performers, untrained in balance and pro-
jection and reliant on technical mixing of sound, find it
Line 60 hard to function in a near-perfect house.)
Until October 1967, the last performance at the Auditor-
ium was of Hellzapoppin’ in 1941, and the last use of the
great stage was for bowling alleys during the Second World
War. Closed after that, it settled into decay for the next
Line 65 20 years. Falling plaster filled the hall, and the golden ceil-
ing was partly ruined by broken roof drains. Last fall the
Auditorium reopened, not quite in its old glory, but close
to it. The splendors of the house were traced in the eight-
candlepower glory of carbon-filament lightbulbs of the
Line 70 same kind used in 1889 when the theater, and electricity,
were new. Their gentle brilliance picked out restored archi-
tectural features in warm gilt and umber.
We have never had greater technical means or expertise
to make our landmarks bloom. The question is no longer
Line 75 whether we can bring old theaters back to new brilliance,
but whether we can fill them when they’re done. As with
the new centers, that will be the acid cultural test.
What does the imagery in lines 40–43 suggest?
Skills needed to score in the next band
As you read a text, consider the author’s use of rhetoric. How does the author try to make himself or herself believable? How does the author use evidence to support his or her point? Think about how the author’s use of rhetoric supports his or her purpose.
As you read a text, consider how the author carefully uses literary devices (such as understatement, mood, allusion, allegory, paradox, voice, and authorial persona) and figurative language. How does the author’s language and use of devices affect the text?
