Poetry Study Goals

• Reread passages.
• Know when the answer is or is not directly from the passage. (Get the meaning, not the wording.)
• Practice guessing definitions.
• Figure out when a description is “close enough”.
• Identify correct, but irrelevant answers.

Maybe it’s just because I hate scrolling back and forth through a PDF, but I’m missing questions I think I would have gotten had I taken the time to go back and read the passage again rather than trust my comprehension and memory.

I also noticed that there are a lot of questions that ask you about what is in the passage without asking you to interpret or infer anything, and it seems like the answer is copied verbatim from the text. A lot of the time, the correct answer is not directly from the text because it tends to be more general and encompasses the whole text. (The guide said to understand the author’s meaning, not just his wording.)

A few questions ask you to infer the definition. Some I can get using prior knowledge and etymology. For the others, practicing process of elimination and the best methods of guessing the correct definition will probably be a useful skill.

Some answers just bug me because they conflict with what I think is correct. I wouldn’t call a nautilus shell spherical, but the AP test might. I just have to figure out when it’s close enough to be the best answer even though I think an equiangular spiroid is more oblong than spherical.

Sometimes it’s hard to pick the correct answer because two of them look completely correct and are mentioned in the passage. I need to learn to figure out which one is relevant to the question I’m being asked.