Supporting Evidence questions, also known as Command-of-Evidence questions or Evidence-Based Pairs, include the dreaded words, "Which choice provides the best evidence for the answer to the previous question?"
The trickiest ones tempt you with two seemingly correct answers. Fortunately, I've found a quick, objective way to answer them.
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I'll illustrate using question 17 from College Board SAT #1. Since Supporting Evidence questions always come in pairs, we have to do questions 16 and 17 together.
16. The passage indicates that the assumption made by gift-givers in lines 41-44 may be
A) Insincere.
B) Unreasonable.
C) Incorrect.
D) Substantiated.
17. Which choice provides the best evidence for the answer to the previous question?
A) Lines 53-55 ("Perhaps...consideration")
B) Lines 58-60 ("According...relationship")
C) Lines 63-65 ("As...consideration")
D) Lines 75-78 ("In...relations")
Lines 41-44: "[G]ift-givers equate how much they spend with how much recipients will appreciate the gift (the more expensive the gift, the stronger a gift-recipient's feelings of appreciation.)"
In order to address everything the questions want us to, it's a good idea to pick up your pencil and draw boxes around important phrases. Even otherwise normal words like because or may can matter.
If you're a strong reader, you can answer #16 by considering the main point of the passage, which I'll summarize in my own words:
Gift-givers think that expensive gifts will be appreciated more than cheap ones, but there's evidence that they're wrong.
Choice (A), insincere, is off-topic. It's possible to be wrong and sincere at the same time.
Choice (B), unreasonable, sounds okay at first, but there doesn't seem to be support for it in the passage. The author mentions research which suggests that gift-givers overspend, perhaps because they're not good at predicting what gifts others will appreciate (lines 22-30), but being bad at predicting (due to limited awareness of others' feelings?) isn't the same thing as making unreasonable decisions.
Choice (C), incorrect, is easier to defend than (B). The passage gives us the answer in lines 44-47: "Although a link between gift price and feelings of appreciation might seem intuitive to gift-givers, such an assumption may be unfounded." You might be tempted to cross of (C) because those lines contain the word may, which suggests only a tentative conclusion, but remember that the word may is also in the question stem. We even drew a box around it, remember?
Choice (D), substantiated, is the opposite of the word we want. Gift-givers may believe that their assumptions are substantiated, but the author of the passage doesn't share their opinion.
I encourage students to do Supporting Evidence question pairs in the order that they show up on the test. This practice builds the strong interpretive skills that are necessary for AP English and academic reading in general. It's also less stressful than skipping around the test.
If you're stuck, though, you can match up the lines from question 17 with the answers in question 16 and eliminate any answer choices that don't pair up:
17. Which choice provides the best evidence for the answer to the previous question?
A) Lines 53-55 ("Perhaps...consideration") This pairs with (D) in question 16.
C) Lines 63-65 ("As...consideration") This matches (C) in question 16.
D) Lines 75-78 ("In...relations") This matches (C) in question 16.
Note that we were able to eliminate choices (A) and (B) in #16 and choice (B) in #17 just by looking at #17 first. You have to pay careful attention to what the passage as a whole is saying, though, because lines 53-55 will give you the wrong answer if you take them out of context.
Assuming that you get #16 right, you're still going to have to choose between (C) and (D) in #17:
C) Lines 63-65: "As for gift-recipients, they may not construe smaller and larger gifts as representing smaller and larger signals of thoughtfulness and consideration."
D) Lines 75-78: "In theoretical terms, people fail to utilize information about their own preferences and experiences in order to produce more efficient outcomes in their exchange relations."
Both choices seem right. From a certain point of view, (D) seems like a better answer because it provides a broader philosophical and scientific explanation for what's going on in the passage.
Unfortunately, (D) is wrong!
The SAT wants us to provide evidence that the author believes XYZ, not proof that XYZ is actually true. That's why question 16 starts with the words "the passage indicates."
The SAT, AP English, and the academic world in general greatly value the distinction between an author's beliefs and the world that exists outside of the author.
Realizing this changes our approach:
The answer to a Supporting Evidence question has to support all the ideas in the question that comes before it.
All we have to do is check the Supporting Evidence answers (from #17) against the words we boxed in the original question (#16).
C) Lines 63-65: "As for gift-recipients, they may not construe smaller and larger gifts as representing smaller and larger signals of thoughtfulness and consideration."
Lines 63-65 address line 51, which mention the assumption and the gift-givers that #16 is asking about. The word "may" in line 63 matches the boxed word in #16.
D) Lines 75-78: "In theoretical terms, people fail to utilize information about their own preferences and experiences in order to produce more efficient outcomes in their exchange relations."
Lines 75-78 are too general to directly tell us directly about the assumption that gift-givers are making. Remember, we're not looking for proof that the author's argument is true, and we don't want the broad implications of his theory. We just want evidence that the author believes that the gift-givers' assumption may be incorrect.
The answer is therefore (C).
More Tricky Questions
Let's apply this technique to the trickiest Supporting Evidence pairs on SAT Practice Test 1: #36-39 from Virginia Woolf's "bridge and procession" passage.36. Woolf indicates that the procession she describes in the passage
A) has come to have more practical influence in recent years.
B) has become a celebrated feature of public life.
C) includes all of the richest and most powerful men in England.
D) has become less exclusionary in its membership in recent years.
The passage alludes to "recent years" in line 19 ("but now, for the past twenty years or so...").
The procession is a metaphorical graduation ceremony. Woolf describes it as "the procession of the sons of educated men" in lines 10-11, and lines 12-17 depict the men in the procession moving from public schools into careers.
Choice (A) is off-topic. The passage talks about everyday things like working and making money in lines 12-45, but it doesn't refer to the procession's influence or whether that influence has become more practical.
Choice (B) is off-topic. We normally celebrate at graduations, but the passage itself doesn't mention a celebration.
Choice (C) uses extreme words ("all," "richest," "most"). The passage lacks the equally extreme language that would be necessary to make (C) correct.
Choice (D) works. The procession now includes women, so it's become less exclusionary ("we go ourselves," line 24). (The pronoun we refers to women: "we" address our "brothers" [line 12], and "we" are the "daughters of educated men" [line 64] as opposed to the "sons of educated men" [lines 10-11].)
37. Which choice provides the best evidence for the answer to the previous question?
A)
B)
C) Lines 23-24 ("For... ourselves") This part of the passage describes what's happened in recent years (line 19), and the inclusion of women has made the procession less exclusionary ("along the tail end of the procession, we go ourselves," lines 23-24).
D)
38. Woolf characterizes the questions in lines 53-57 ("For we...men") as both
A) controversial and threatening.
B) weighty and unanswerable.
C) momentous and pressing.
D) provocative and mysterious.
We can find the answer to this question directly by looking a little bit above and below the lines in question:
"The questions that we have to ask and answer about that procession during this moment of transition are so important that they may well change the lives of all men and women for ever. For we have to ask ourselves, here and now, do we wish to join that procession, or don't we? On what terms shall we join the procession? Above all, where it is leading us, the procession of educated men? The moment is short; it may last five years; ten years, or perhaps only a few months longer." (lines 53-59)
The bold-faced words lead us directly to choice (C), momentous and pressing. The other three choices contain words that are off-topic.
Unfortunately, none of the choices in #39 contain lines 53-59. It's a good idea to check all of the choices regardless of where we think the answer might be, just in case we've done #38 incorrectly.
39. Which choice provides the best evidence for the answer to the previous question?
A)
B) Lines 48-49 ("And...them") "Very important questions" = momentous, "questions" = questions, and "very little time" = pressing.
C)
D)
Now that you've learned to conquer the hardest Supporting Evidence questions, try your hand at some more SAT practice tests!
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| Be sure to growl like a conquering Viking. You can't get kicked out of a practice test... can you? |
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