When you look at an SAT II U.S. History question, the answer is always right there in front of you, hidden among a selection of incorrect answer choices. There are two methods you can use to answer the question correctly:
- Go directly to the right answer.
- Eliminate wrong answers until there’s only one answer left.
In a perfect world, you would always know the right answer. And for many of the questions on the test, this will probably be the case. But for questions you’re uncertain about you can also work backwards, crossing out choices you know can’t be right.
Eliminating Wrong Answers
We’ve already explained how thinking contextually can help your studying, and help you spot correct answers. It can also help you eliminate wrong answers. Let’s say you come across this question:
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What if you look at this question and just don’t know the answer? Take a step back: first identify the era the question covers to help you put the question into some historical context. In this case, knowing that “Between the 1860s and 1890s” roughly corresponds to the Industrial Revolution will help you remember the themes of that time period. What comes to mind when you think of industrialization? Perhaps big business and a rise in urbanization and immigration? If so, you can proceed to check off (A) and (C), since they’re both true. (Remember, for these EXCEPT questions, you are looking for the answer that doesn’t belong, so eliminate all the answers that are true.) The Industrial Revolution also created an increase in available jobs, which likely drew many women out of the home and into factories, allowing you to eliminate answer (E). Answer choice (D) might be a little trickier: the half of the answer is true—this period (also known as the “Era of Big Business”) spawned huge corporations like Carnegie’s steel industry and Rockefeller’s oil company—but what about government regulation? If you can’t remember what government did with business during the Industrial Revolution, you can’t decide if (D) is true or false. As for (B), you may not know precisely what went on with unions during those years, so you can’t say for sure whether that answer is right or wrong either.
Left with two possible answer choices, (B) and (D), how do you choose? You should be able to see that (B) and (D) are at odds with one another. If (B) were true, and unions held such political power, they probably would have pushed for government to strictly regulate business in order to check the tyranny of monopolies (that is, the poor treatment of workers and the high prices of goods). If this were the case then the Industrial Revolution would hardly be known as the “Era of Big Business,” would it? Think again about what you remember about the trends of industrialization: big business was definitely a major one; unions, on the other hand, don’t stand out in your memory. Armed with this knowledge, take a little leap of faith and guess that (B) is the correct answer.
Guess what? You guessed right!
Questions For Which You Can’t Eliminate all Answers
Not all questions on the SAT II U.S. History Test will work out quite as well as our last example. You might not always be able to use your knowledge of trends and eras to eliminate four answer choices, ensuring that you get the question right. But for almost every question you will probably be able to eliminate at least one answer, and that can help a lot. Let’s move on to the next section to find out why.