Today’s SAT question of the day is a cool math problem about a ladder! Really, it’s kind of fun. The question:
A 25-foot ladder is placed against a vertical wall of a building, with the bottom of the ladder standing on concrete 7 feet from the base of the building. If the top of the ladder slips down 4 feet, then the bottom of the ladder will slide out how many feet?
First, we have to make a sketch of the initial ladder setup:
Here’s today’s SAT question of the day:
The population of Norson, the largest city in Transitania, is 50 percent of the rest of the population of Transitania. The population of Norson is what percent of the entire population of Transitania?
Don’t jump to conclusions and say 50% – let’s think (briefly) first so we arrive at the correct answer. Continue reading
Today’s SAT question is a writing question that asks if the following sentence needs any modifications to the underlined “like”:
Like machinery was integral to the development of industrial capitalism, so the rapid transfer of information is the force driving modern business.
“Like” and “so” have been known go together sometimes (like the sands of the hourglass, so are the days of our lives…”, but do these correlative conjunctions function correctly here? Continue reading
Today’s sentence completion:
“It was difficult to believe that the sophisticated piece of technology had ——- through the centuries from such ——- and rudimentary apparatus.”
For the first blank, let’s think about what the technology might have done through the centuries. Continue reading
Well, hello. If x = 60 degrees, y = 40 degrees, and those dashed lines are bisectors, what might we say is the value of z?
Quick review: to bisect something is to cut it into two equal parts. In this case, x is cut into 2 30-degree angles and y is cut into 2 20-degree angles. Are we there yet?
Today’s identifying sentence errors question has a verb problem. Verb issues (tense, number) are one of the most commonly tested topics in the SAT writing section.
The question:
Aside from Shakespeare, perhaps no writer in English have engaged the public’s imagination more thoroughly than Charles Dickens.
What is the subject of this sentence? Continue reading
Today’s ACT question of the day is an English question from the passage about baseball. We’re asked to fix the underlined part of this sentence (only the first part of which is pasted below, because the final clause doesn’t affect us):
I was a freshman at a university that was located in the Midwest at the time,
There is nothing egregiously wrong with this sentence, but it could be better. Continue reading
Today’s SAT question of the day is a math question about graphing lines. Pay attention, because I have seen this type of question too many times to count!
The question asks us for the equation of a line that is parallel to the x-axis and 4 units above the x-axis. All of the answer choices are x = an integer or y = an integer.
First, let’s figure out if this line is “x = something” or “y = something”. Continue reading
Today’s SAT question of the day is an improving sentences question about chocolate chip cookies. The original sentence that we need to improve:
All of the ingredients for Pablo’s secret chocolate chip cookie recipe, which included the special dark chocolate, was available in his mother’s pantry.
Today’s ACT question of the day is a question from the science passage about a stick and its shadow. We need to determine what would happen to the shadow lengths of the stick if only 0.5m of the stick was exposed.