Let's say that you're taking the high stakes Spanish AP exam, you allocated six minutes for the six questions on a long reading passage, and you come across this "gem" of a question:
The theme of an article should be positive or negative. That is something my students can understand, and be succesful at. When you throw in the options that the tone is a. urgent and realistic, b. funny, and serious, c. realistic and serious, and d. urgent and funny... well. the answer becomes less black and white.
What do we tell our students?
Teach about the process of elimination.
The AP-reading passage that this question came from was from the Triangulo A Propósito book, page 34. The article talked about acne.
I tell the kids, first of all, which answer do you for SURE know is right? For this particular passage, we knew for sure that it was realistic. It was a scientific article, meant to be informative.
Realistic was in choices A and C. It came to the decision whether the article was urgent or serious. Because there wasn't a tone of "this affects you all," I explained the answer was serious.
I also tell the kids, you need to know what all the answer choices mean. If you don't know, then you have to use logic with what you know to figure things out.
Hope that helps, AP teachers!
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