Knowing about a strategy doesn’t help you if you never use it on the SAT. Many students read a book like this, say “Yes! That’s all true!” then never once apply the techniques on real or practice tests. As you might expect, their scores don’t improve very much, if at all.

To prevent this from happening to you, look at every item you encounter and always first ask yourself the question, “Which strategy would work well on this item?” Sometimes more than one strategy will do the trick—that’s why learning many different strategies is so helpful.

The items themselves often contain clues within the stem, and that will give you a good idea of what strategy to use: