SAT Skills Insight
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Organization and Ideas
Skills needed to score in this band
SKILL 1: Analyze context, sentence structure, and sentence variation to construct meaning within and across sentences and texts
SKILL 2: Interpret multiple layers of a text
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1
Analyze context, sentence structure, and sentence variation to construct meaning within and across sentences and texts
ExampleThis passage is adapted from a 1981 book on the history of the blues.
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A reading passage Line Number Text I have some difficulty in describing why I traveled to
West Africa and what I was doing there, since the jour-
ney that became so complicated and took me to so many
unexpected places seemed—in the beginning—to be so
Line 5 simple and so clearly defined. I went to Africa to find the
roots of the blues. It had always been obvious that the
blues sprang from a complex background, with much of
it developing from the music of the long period of African
slavery in the United States and with some of its harmonic
Line 10 forms and instrumental styles derived out of a broad European
context. It had always been just as obvious that there
were certain elements in the blues—in the singing style
and in the rhythmic structures—that were not traceable
to anything in the countryside of the American South.
Line 15 These things, it seemed to me, might have come from
a distantly remembered African background, even if
there had been such a lengthy period between the break
in contact with Africa and the emergence of the blues in
the 1890s.
Line 20 In the beginning I planned simply to record the tribal
singers of West Africa known as griots, since it was these
musicians who seemed to come closest to what we know as
a blues singer. They are from tribes that had many people
taken to the southern states as slaves, and they usually
Line 25 sing alone, accompanying themselves for the most part
on plucked string instruments. Since most African music
is performed by village groups, and is often dominated by
drumming, this practice in itself is enough to set the griots
apart. At the same time I hoped to collect from the singers
Line 30 narrative accounts of the first encounters between the
Africans and the Europeans, told from the African
viewpoint. I felt that this could give me a clearer picture of
one of the factors that had shaped the early Black
experience in the United States.
Line 35 Before leaving for Africa I’d spent months taking notes
on the tribal groups and working with as much material
on the griots as I could find. As I traveled I had a definite
idea of where I wanted to go, but at the same time I had
not planned the trip in any way. I’ve always felt that to
Line 40 plan a trip too carefully is to make sure you won’t find
out anything you don’t already know.
I didn’t know, however, how much the simple trip I
had begun would change direction once I’d come to Africa,
almost as if it took on a life and a will of its own. I began
Line 45 to feel like someone who had bought a set of boxes that
fit inside each other in a wooden nest. When I opened
one there was another inside it, and inside that one was
still another. I found so many boxes inside each other that
the simple project I had begun with became a series of
Line 50 new perceptions, each of which was contained within the
perception—the box—that I’d just opened. Sometimes,
as I sat on sagging beds engulfed in mosquito nets, the
space around me seemed to be filled with the myriad boxes
of different sizes that my notebooks and tapes had come to
Line 55 symbolize.
When I opened the box that was the music I’d come
to record, I found that the box inside was slavery itself.
There was no way that I could work with the music without
taking into consideration how it had come to the United
Line 60 States. I also realized that this was one of the reasons I had
come to Africa. I was trying to find traces of an experience,
and not only that, I was looking for traces of an experience
that had occurred hundreds of years before. Would what I
found have any reality for me so many years afterward?
Line 65 I understand now that this complex set of questions had
already been there in my mind when I put the microphones
and the tape recorder into my shoulder bag. I had always
tried to have some conception of the slavery that had
brought people from West Africa to the United States, even
Line 70 if I hadn’t seen, symbolically, that when I opened the box
decorated with pictures of musicians and instruments inside
it would be the next box, illustrated with old engravings of
slave ships. I had come to Africa to find a kind of song, to
find a kind of music and the people who performed it. But
Line 75 nothing can be taken from a culture without considering its
context.
In context, the reference to “notebooks and tapes” (line 54) primarily serves to
