 We're not here Monday, not yesterday, Monday. There is that link available to see the class from Monday if you need to go over it again, or if you weren't here Monday and you wanna check out everything that we did, we've got all that information there about the changes on the SAT. So make sure that you're familiar with those things. I'm also gonna create a folder, which I'm going to share with the group today that has all the materials that we're working with and the slides that I'm showing you here in the class and everything else. So you're gonna have all that material that you can access and that'll be in a folder in Google Drive that I'll share with everybody here. So you guys are gonna get that stuff after the class is over today. I'll probably put it in the group tonight, okay? Everybody here should be then in our WhatsApp group. So you will have all the latest information. The class now is totally full. So it's just us for the rest of this summertime. So I wanna start just by reminding us of the most important strategy for this test. This is something that we talked about towards the end of the class on Monday. So I'm gonna share my screen real quick and see what we remember, all right? So I talked about this, that we need to think about the approach to each question. There's a method here that we need to memorize and master, okay? So just like how in math, there's that order of operations. First you do these things and then you do these things, right? You do your exponents, then you do your multiplications, right? Stuff like that. So the same kind of thing has happened in here with our English questions. What's the first step? Does anybody remember? Let's see, try. Nothing? Yeah, Araldo, what do you think? I'm not sure, but I think it could be like, first you have to like see the possible solutions, but I don't know. Okay, there's one thing in particular we really wanna start by looking at first. So think about the components that we have, right? All right, Mariana? Read the question. That's the one, yeah. We wanna start with the question, okay? So we wanna scan that question. We gotta look at the question because that is going to tell us something very important, which is step two. Any ideas on what the second step is here? Clarice? I think it's like the type of question. Okay, exactly. We gotta figure out what type of question we're dealing with, very good. So if I first focus on the question, then I can look at the type of question it is and okay, all right, I'm dealing with a vocabulary question. I'm dealing with a supporting claims question. Again, we're gonna learn about all those types of questions throughout the course, but we gotta know what types of questions we have because then we gotta do something else. The type of question is going to tell us what? Step three. This is probably the harder one to remember at this point. Let's see what you got. Any ideas? What comes next? All right, I'm gonna give it to you this one. So the third thing is we gotta decide how much to read, okay? The type of question is going to determine just how much we have to read, all right? That's the important thing here. So you don't always have to read the whole paragraph. In fact, a lot of times that would be a bad idea. So what we wanna do is go, okay, I see what type of question it is. What's the right strategy for that type of question? What do I have to look for? Where do I need to go in the text? That's how you're gonna get faster and that's the key to doing well on this test. We gotta improve velocity. So after you decide how much to read, then you're gonna extract the information you need. You're gonna pull that information out and that's what's gonna give you the info that you need to succeed here. And from there, then we're gonna be able to actually record our answer, right? So maybe use the acronym CIDER to help you remember, right? You're gonna scan, identify, decide, extract, record. Like, so I'm gonna scan that question, identify what type it is, decide how much to read and where, and then I'm gonna pull that information out that I need and record my answer, okay? So that's the method we gotta use for all of these things. Hello, Sebastian, I see you here, how's it going? I adore you. Good, good. All right, so I just wanna review that real quick because I think that's really important for us as we go through this process. We need to know this strategy. This is the strategy that we're gonna apply to every single one of our questions in the English portion. And it also kinda helps you with the math portion too, like understanding what kind of question you have is going to make it easier for you to think, okay, then what's the best way to resolve this problem? It's a similar approach for math except we don't have to go to the text, we have to go to the problem, right? So I wanna talk a little bit about how we work with vocabulary questions for each kind of question we need to know how to identify it quickly. And fortunately, that's pretty easy because they typically use the same type of phrase or some key words that we can learn and then quickly identify these questions. My goal, like by the time you guys get done with this course, you should be able to identify some types of questions instantly, like not even reading the whole thing because you will just know like, oh, I see this word, I know what to do. That's how you get good, okay? So there are two different phrases that could appear when we're dealing with vocabulary, all right? First, you might see one like this, which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase. The key words there at the very end, word or phrase. If you see that, that means it's a vocabulary question, simple as that. 30% of the questions are vocabulary. Don't forget that 30%, all right? So that's 30% of your grade in English are vocabulary questions. So you're gonna see this a lot. Whether you get an easy module or a hard module, you're gonna see this a lot. There's another way it could be phrased too, that would be which choice completes the text with the most logical transition. Now, if I see the word transition, I know I'm dealing with vocabulary, but specifically connecting words. And on Monday, I gave you that first practice set of vocabulary and that was focused on connecting words and that's exactly how the questions are phrased. We're gonna practice those questions today and then move on to some other stuff, but that's how we identify vocabulary questions. So key words, if you see word or phrase, that's a sign that is vocabulary. If you see transition, that's also a vocabulary sign, but now we're thinking about transitioning between sentences. So I wanna show you how I approach that, how I apply this method to the vocabulary questions. So I'm gonna show you an example. This is one that is for connectors. Take a look at this for a second. You see the question is exactly what I just showed you. Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition? So the first thing I do is go here to the question. Next, I see what kind of question it is. I see it's the most logical transition. So I know that I'm dealing with a vocabulary, transition, connectors. So now I gotta figure out what to read. And here's the thing. A transition is going to connect two sentences. So what I need to do is read those two sentences. I don't have to read the whole paragraph. How many sentences are in this paragraph? 10 and six, that looks like six lines, but not sentences. Three. Three, I see three. I see three periods, right? So one is after Paris, one is after Painter, one is after Flourish. Now I see the blank is here. So it's right after Painter, but it's before this other sentence. So what I gotta read is like this stuff around here. I gotta read the sentence before and after the blank so that I know how to transition, okay? That's the way it works. Now, if I just start reading this, she was studying firsthand the color saturated style of France's modernist masters and began to make a name for herself as a painter. Cher Gill long to return to her childhood home of India. Right away I'm looking for key information here. Like how can I figure out the transition? Again, it's pretty clear to me that there's a difference here. There's France where things are going okay, but then also she wants to go back to India. So like there's a contrast here. There's something different. And so with that specific detail, with that information, I can conclude which connector I should use. We looked at this quick on Monday. So I won't spend a lot of time explaining it, but still would be the best one cause it's the only one that kind of does a contrast or something different, right? So that's how I approach this. I do not need to know about November 1934. I do not need to know about the first, like the first sentence doesn't really help me at all. It doesn't matter. So why would I read it? Why waste time? It's not asking me about when it happened. It's not asking me about whether it was the ideal city. It's just trying to get me to connect two sentences. So I'm just gonna focus on that stuff and that's how I'm gonna get it, all right? So that's how we wanna approach our vocabulary questions. Especially when we have connectors, we gotta read the sentence before and the sentence after. And that way we can minimize the work that we spend. We can answer this very quickly. Now take an example that is just a generic vocabulary question. This one again, the question is, which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase? So now I know I'm definitely dealing with vocabulary. I've got these four options, right? Recognizable and treating it significantly useful, but I gotta go to the blank. I gotta take a look at that area. Now in this case, because it's not a transition, I really don't need to read much more than the sentence it is in, okay? So I'm just gonna focus on this sentence, right? And as I read it, I see it as because this trait, right here, I have to pause for a second. What is this trait? What is it referring to? If I see this, what does this mean? We can replace this, go ahead, tell me. Underness, it's the first word. Exactly, it's the first word right here, you got it. So now I can just keep reading. I can go back, all right. So I just went back real fast to figure out what it was talking about just to make sure I'm on the same page, right? And now I can keep going. So okay, because handedness is present, but less something in many other animals, animal behavior researchers often employ tasks specifically designed to reveal. This is a key word here, to reveal. That tells me something, okay. This handedness is less something and so they design experiments to reveal. So that should give me a clue as to which answer is correct. Aurolo, got your hand up, what do you think? Through the letter A. That's what I think, recognizable, right? Recognizable is something you can see, something you can recognize. So they're telling us that it's difficult to do that because we need to make these special experiments to reveal that information. So by picking up these key words, I've put it all together and yeah, I'm gonna mark recognizable number five. Easy peasy, okay. So that's how we have to approach vocabulary questions. We're gonna do a lot of these throughout the course because you're gonna do a lot of these on the exam. And vocabulary questions, you know, this is the easiest way to do it. I don't need to understand the whole paragraph. I don't really even need to understand much of what it's about. I just gotta figure out, okay, what would make less, what would make sense with this task designed to reveal something, right? I put the pieces together, I get my answer, okay? So that's how we gotta do this. That's the method, that's the approach. We're gonna keep practicing that for each type of question because we've gotta learn how to identify those things and how to find them quickly. Now, I gave you guys on Monday a set of vocabulary exercises and I'm gonna put it back in the group real quick just because there's some people who might not have gotten it on Monday. So give me one second here. Let me go ahead and drop that back in our group. There it is right there. So on Monday, we just looked at the definitions and using them in a sentence. Now, there are eight vocabulary questions on this worksheet and I want you all to try to do those and then we're gonna check them out together. Now, on the SAT, you have one minute and 10 seconds for every one of your questions. If we take an average, one minute, 10 seconds. For vocabulary, we wanna be faster than that because some types of questions do take more time. Some questions don't. So I think vocabulary is one of those kinds of questions that we should try to answer quickly so that we can have more time for some of the harder questions that we're gonna see later. So anytime we can save time, we want to save that time. We can use that time later. That's the best strategy to go with here. So you all have this PDF. I'm gonna share the screen down here too so you can see where we are. So after the first page, which had the definitions of these words, which were all connecting words and example sentences for us to practice, we've got eight questions that are exactly like we see on the SAT and each one has a little button to check your answer after you're done. But I want you guys to not check your answers just yet. I want you guys to try to do it for real. So what I want you to do is in the chat, start like as you go, type your answers, okay? And don't send them to me until we're done. All clear? Make sense? You're gonna type your answers into the chat but you're not gonna send them until you're done so that we can check them all out at the same time and see if everybody agrees, all right? And don't cheat. Because they're meant to be useful for you to practice at home too but I don't want you guys cheating on it, all right? So that's what we're gonna do. Another thing that I wanted to mention, I'm not super strict about cameras but I do like to have them on while you work when I'm not talking. When I'm talking, I'm usually looking up here at my camera so I'm not even looking at you anyway so I don't care. So if you see this, that's your clue, all right, big brother's watching. I'd like you to throw your cameras on while we do the work. So I'm gonna set a timer here. So we have eight questions. I think we should be able to do those eight questions in about six minutes. I think that's a good amount of time for this. So we'll see if you can do that. We'll see if that's enough. All right, so like I said, I wanna see you while you work. I wanna watch you while you work. And then we're gonna have six minutes to go ahead and work on these, okay? So I'm gonna start that timer now and I want you to try to, again, just type in the chat. You could just put A, B, C, D, whatever. You don't even have to number them. You could just put them in a row and then when we're done, I'll tell you to send them, okay, so let's get started. Go. Okay, that was six minutes. Please send me privately all the answers that you have. If you haven't finished them yet, that's okay. Just send me what you have so far. I wanna see where you are. All right, looks like everybody's gotten most of them done so far. Let's take a look here. All right, that was good. Francisco, okay, let's say I got Juliana, I got Juliana, I got Clarice, I got Michelle, I got Lolo, I got Adriana, I got Aranza, I got Francisco, I got Adriana. All right, cool. If you haven't finished them all yet, that's totally okay. All right, because like I said, I'm trying to push you to go faster than you really need to go. We will work on that. We'll get faster. All right, cool. Sounds good. And I know Aranza, you got the PDF a little bit late, so it's cool. Don't worry. I'm a reasonable person. All right, let's check these out together real quick. And then we're gonna start with another set in a little bit. So let's hop down to here. Okay, so first one here, it looks like, I think just about everybody's got this one more or less right for the most part, right? So there's a couple of choices that I think could work, but there's one that's definitely the best, all right? I see A and C as possible answers, but I think A is better than C, why? Can anybody try to explain that for me? Why would you rather have conversely versus curiously? When would I use curiously instead of like something else? No ideas? Pretty much everybody marked A, so you should know, should have a reason. What do you think Aranza? Tell me what you think, why would you mark consequently here? Because it sounds better than all the other options. All right, I would agree with that statement. Let's think about what that word means, right? Consequently, it's a consequence, right? So if I look at the first sentence, again, I hope you didn't read any of this stuff. If you were reading this stuff, you were wasting time, people, don't read that stuff. That stuff there is unnecessary, all right? That's a waste of your time. All I need to look at is this right here, okay? So I see that it can help reduce stress and improve sleep quality and strengthen bones and muscles. All right, so if you do those things, consequently, it helps to protect against diseases, right? Like if you're sleeping well and having a stronger body and you have less stress, that should lead to that consequence, right? So that would be the best choice. And that's what we got down here. Curiously would be useful maybe if it was a completely different idea. You're like, curiously, the same is true in dogs. I'd be like, yeah, that is kind of curious. I didn't ask for that info, but thanks for telling me. Could work like that. But consequently, it would be your best choice. All right, let me take a look at what you've all put here for the next one. I'm seeing a lot of D on number two. It looks like everybody agrees on that. Let's see if that makes sense. So here we've got, again, the world is constantly changing, opportunities. And then it says it's important to stay open-minded. So if we're talking about change and new opportunities, being open-minded seems like a logical continuation of that, right? So I would agree. I think therefore is the best answer. That's like the next step, right? If the world's constantly changing, you need to be open-minded. You got to keep an open mind. So, and it also even adds on to that if you were to keep reading by doing so, right? So clearly it's a logical progression here. I want to use therefore. All right, for the third one, another transition. All right, let's see. I want to scan your answers here. I'm seeing some Cs. I'm seeing some, I'm mostly seeing Cs. I'm seeing some As too, kind of interesting. All right, so we've got, seems like a bit of a split. I'm curious, Mariana, you said C, why? C because I thought it was a great one because it connects very well the first sentence and the second one. Okay, I think it connects. I want to hear some more explanations. Francisco, what do you think? You're still with me? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, can you hear me? Yeah, loud and clear. Because in the first sentence, then there is an idea of being presented. And then when I say, however, there is a connection with the second sentence that is very few, simple step, so that's why I think it's very good. All right, so I want to hear from a couple of the other people that marked something else here because I saw a couple other, looks like I saw a couple of different ones. Julianne, you said A, what do you think about this one? Yes, I said A because I thought that while you have that fear of public speaking, you can do like the simple steps that are talking about in the third sentence. Okay. Something like that. Makes sense. So I think there was some good, maybe logic behind different answers, but I always want to try to look for that best answer. So for me, however, does a good job here and I want to show why. This first sentence also has a connector and it says many people are intimidated by the thought of public speaking, but it's an important skill to have. This right here, I think is the key point that it's people are intimidated, but we have simple steps to lessen your fear. So I see a contrast between those two things. I see, okay, it's something that scares a lot of people, but there are these simple steps to lessen your fear. So that's where I see the connection. That's why it's important to make sure I read like the whole previous sentence. If you just read here, if you just see it's an important skill to have and there's a few simple steps, I might be more inclined to choose meanwhile, but if I look at this part and I see that it's intimidated by the thought of public speaking and then there's this whole idea about becoming more comfortable, simple steps, lessen your fear. There's like three good things that contrast what the first sentence says. So for me, I want to use a contrast connector. I want to use C here. I want to use however, okay? Now, going to number four, right? Same kind of thing here. Let's see, I want to ask somebody. Michelle, what do you think about number four? So I chose number D, which was farther north. Well, because it's first mentioning some key points and then it's mentioning like something that they also do. Because I thought it was the most likely to go wrong. Yeah, keep in mind that the right answer may not be the best answer that could possibly exist. There might be a better word that would go in there that isn't available here. So sometimes we got to choose the best of our options. But I also think that that makes a lot of sense. I think furthermore is the right answer here because they're saying in spite of difficult circumstances they've found ways to be successful. And now I'm adding to that point, they demonstrate that hard work and determination can lead to positive outcomes. It's essentially expanding on the previous idea. It's not therefore, because it's not a direct consequence. It's not a contrast because it's basically just elaborating. So I wouldn't use C or D here, right? So I'm going to stick to furthermore. I think that's the best case for this one as well. All right, for number five, let's see here. I want to talk to you. I'm going to talk to you today. Adriana, what do you think about five? Okay, number one makes sense makes sense because they contrast to different themes. That doesn't mention he felt stuck in a rut. After that same mesh contemplation and so cherishing, so is that someone is doing something to do, to this. Okay, so we've got this idea of being stuck in a rut, right? You can't seem to find happiness. You're kind of depressed or frustrated or whatever, right? But then he realized he could take control of his own life and make things better. So I agree, I think that's the best choice, right? And it looks like you got the right answer down here. Again, therefore an as a result would be like a direct consequence of that. And it doesn't make sense, right? If you're immediately in a bad situation, you wouldn't naturally just go, oh, okay, I can fix it. That's not how depression works. And then in contrast doesn't really make sense either because like maybe it would make sense if we were talking about somebody else, right? I always think sometimes if you're not sure between two choices, a good idea is to think, okay, what would this sentence look like if I use this word? Like if I said in contrast, his best friend Mark was having the time of his life and everything seemed to be going perfectly. Like that would be a good in contrast sense, you know? But that's not what I got. So I think nevertheless is also a good choice here. All right, nicely done. Okay, let's go to number six. Sebastian, what do you think for number six? Oh, I didn't get there. Okay, didn't get there yet? All right, so let's take a look at it quick. Work on it with me. So in this case, we have it at the beginning of the sentence at the beginning of the paragraph. So I don't really have to look at another sentence. I just have to look at this first sentence that is establishing the topic of our paragraph, right? So we have two statements. There are many challenges in life. It is possible to overcome them, right? Given these options, what do you think would be a good choice? B. All right, B, although, right? Let's see if that makes sense. I think it does too. That's a great place to put although, right? At the start of a sentence and then have kind of two contrasting ideas. Although there are many challenges in life, it is possible to overcome them, right? Nice positive messages today. So good, that's what I would say too. All right, so going on to seven. Adaldo, what do you think for this one? Right, so I think it could be so exciting. You mean, I think that meanwhile, yes. Okay, meanwhile. All right, now this one is a bit of a like, you know, literary style, right? This one kind of feels a little bit more like a story or something, right? I have, if I use meanwhile, remember that that's usually something I would use when I kind of want to describe maybe two things happening at the same time. They might be two different things, but I'm looking usually at same things happening in the same setting or same situation. So the summer setting, casting a pink hue across the sky. Meanwhile, I sat on the porch watching my kids play in the front yard with their friends. That seems pretty good to me. I like that. I don't see, I don't think a therefore makes sense. I don't think a whereas makes sense because like again, we're still talking about the same person. He would be looking at the sky while he's outside with his kids. All right, so let's see if it makes sense. I think it does. I'd say that's a good answer. All right, so let's go to our last one and we'll move on here. So Juliana, what do you think for number eight? What did you get? I think it's a... Okay, also a meanwhile. All right, so we could use that. Let's see, we often take for granted the resources and opportunities that are available. So meanwhile, some people struggle to find access to basic necessities and food, clothing, and shelter. Yeah, however, there's a problem with that. So I want you to look at the full sentence here, right? If I use meanwhile, right? Ideally, and this is where a little bit of our punctuation knowledge comes in, take a look at how we just used it here. I'm gonna zoom in deep on this one. We had a comma after this blank, right? We said, meanwhile, and then we describe it with a full sentence. I sat on the porch watching my kids play in front of the house with their friends, right? Now look at this one. It says, blank, some people struggle to find access to basic necessities such as food, clothing, and shelter. This is like the first half of the sentence essentially. And then it says, we have unlimited possibilities at our disposal. This part and this part seem to contradict each other. There seems to be something that doesn't match up. Which option could maybe work here instead? Ariana, I saw your answer. What do you think? I put letter C. All right, so if I wanna, like again, if I recognize that contrast, right? Between this part and this part, I'm gonna say, I think I want a contrasting phrase, one that I could use maybe at the start of a sentence. And I think whereas would definitely be a good choice here. Whereas some people struggle to find access to basic necessities such as food, clothing, and shelter, we have unlimited possibilities at our disposal. This concept of inequality. So meanwhile doesn't work with two different clauses here. I can't have these two parts of a sentence with meanwhile, right? I usually would use meanwhile, comma, and then just explain the situation that was happening at the same time as the previous. Whereas in this case, I have two different ideas that I need to contrast. So I need to use a phrase like whereas, okay? So that would be your best choice here. Now, again, we're gonna continue to do a lot of practice with these words, but something I think you all should do is like, make a note, write down some things as you do this class, if there are some things that you make mistakes on, make a note of it. Think about, okay, what words should I continue to practice? What things do I need to get better at? Because that's how we're gonna do this. That's how we're gonna get better. You guys have to be willing to put in some of that practice time, okay? Like I said, on Monday, and I'll repeat it again for everybody here today, because I know there's some new people today. Ultimately, you will determine your success on this exam, okay? You have to put in the work. We grow up today. We're gonna keep growing up as we go through this course. And whether you choose to take that time or not to practice extra stuff is gonna determine a lot of your success, okay? So that's what we wanna be doing here is thinking about, okay, I screwed up number eight. I'm gonna make a point to like review the word whereas, look for some more examples, make sure I understand how to use it, because I guarantee you a word like that is gonna show up on the SAT. And this is your chance now to identify that opportunity to get better. All right, we're gonna shut that down for a second here, and we're gonna go back to our slides. We're gonna talk about another kind of question here. So, and something else I wanted to say just before I move on real quick, we're gonna bounce around quite a bit in this class, okay? I'm not gonna just do vocabulary for an hour and then like keep doing that stuff. Like we're gonna bounce back and forth between topics quite a bit. I know that that may be a little confusing at times. Trust me, it's good for you. What we need to do is try to remember stuff. And so putting some space in between those activities is gonna help you do that. So I wanna talk a little bit now about punctuation because punctuation is the second biggest part of the test for English, okay? I mentioned this on Monday, 30% vocabulary, about 17% punctuation, 18% depending on how you round up or down. So we're talking about literally like, half your grade are these two types of questions, vocabulary and punctuation, half your grade. So if we can just get good at those two things, we can at least get a pretty decent score. Like we can get a respectable one that won't make us feel bad about ourselves. That's nice. All we gotta do is focus on two things and we can get good. We focus on the rest, we'll get great, all right? So these are the two areas that we're gonna spend a lot of time on. And I wanna give you the seven punctuation marks that you have to know. I swear, these are the ones that show up on the test all the time. And if you don't know how to use one, you're gonna have a bad time, okay? Because essentially every punctuation question tests you on multiple kinds of punctuation. Like if you have four answer choices using different punctuations, then you gotta know all of them. So we gotta learn a little bit more about these. Now I wanna start with the easy boys cause I think these are the ones that like we all are pretty familiar with in English but it's always good to review very quick. Period, all right? Full stop, finish a sentence. These are sometimes the right answer. You will sometimes see questions that tell you to like use punctuation to sort of combine maybe two sentences to use a connector. But you might have the option to just use a period and start a new sentence. And that might be the best option, okay? So keep that in mind. Like using a period could be a good thing to do especially if we're changing topics, changing subjects or we've had a really long sentence and we don't wanna make it much longer might be best to just put a period. The comma, the comma has a few different functions. The first one is to add pause or emphasis. A comma is literally for making a pause when you are reading out loud or reading a book or something. It tells you to slow down for a second. That can also be used to add emphasis to things. I wanna make it clear that will not be the right choice on the SAT for that reason because that's subjective. Whether you want to put emphasis or not is up to you. Okay, so they're not gonna ask you to like the right answer would not be a comma for emphasis because that's subjective. It's not something you can like follow strictly to a rule. It's sort of the writer's choice, okay? But where you will see a lot of questions about commas is in extra information. We use commas to add information to our sentences. Sometimes it's just extra details. Sometimes it's like a final thought about something. Commas have an important role there. And that's where a lot of questions go. A lot of punctuation questions test you on your ability to use commas correctly for additional information. Then we got the apostrophe. The apostrophe is used for two things in English. One is when you want to conjunct your words, right? You've got or a contraction, conjunction depending on how you call it. So if you've got the word it and is, you can make it's with the apostrophe different from it's without the apostrophe, right? You have have and not, you can say haven't. This is basic English grammar. I don't feel like I have to explain it more. Possession though, we use it a lot for the possessive S. Like, you know what I'm saying, Andrews, whatever. This is Andrews class, right? My friends plural, apostrophe after it, house. All right, so I find that sometimes the SAT likes to ask questions about this possessive S to see if you know the right place to put the apostrophe because gringos have problems with that. Remember that this is a test made for gringos, all right? It's a test made for American people. You get to take it, but it's for American people. And that's something that we often screw up as native speakers. And so it's something that typically shows up on the test at least a couple of times. I would not be surprised if you get at least one question about that specific thing. Major point about commas. I guarantee that you need less commas than you think you do. However many commas you think you should put, you probably should put less. Like a lot of times the answer will be no commas or less commas than you think you should put. Because I, and I've noticed this for my years of teaching, like Spanish has a tendency to use a lot of commas. I've seen people write entire paragraphs that are just like comma, comma, comma, comma, comma. And like one period at the end, that is not acceptable in English. That is not okay. So generally you're gonna want, I usually recommend like about a two to one ratio, okay? If you've got a sentence with a period, two commas is a pretty good number of commas. If you have more than two, you should be suspicious. If you have more than three, it's probably wrong. If your sentence has four commas, there better be a damn good reason why you have four commas, okay? I can only think of a few situations where that would be a good idea. Most of the time you're gonna want to limit it to two, maybe three, depending on how the sentence started. Do you have any questions about these three before I move on? Adriana. Sorry, yes, can you explain again how many commas is normal to use in a paragraph or in a sentence? I wanna, I'll crack open a little word doc here and maybe show you a little bit. Just cause I think it's good to see some examples then. Yeah, let's talk about that a little bit because commas is honestly where I see a lot of punctuation questions and it's where I see a lot of punctuation mistakes. So let me just move some stuff around here. Okay, there's some things, there we go. All right, so you should be seeing this blank word doc. So I'm just gonna write an example of a sentence with different numbers of commas that I think would be good. Let me give you an example of a three comma exam, right? Like where this would be a good place for three, all right. Okay, here's a case where I would have three or maybe four commas, but this time I got three, right? I want you to see three commas here and why it's okay. All right, I am using two commas here for this part, which is for extra information, okay? I have one at the beginning of this and I have one at the end of this and this is my extra information. I could delete this part and the sentence would still be okay, right? But since I'm putting that extra information in the middle of the sentence, I'm gonna use two commas. I got one here and one here. I also have one here because I started this sentence with an adverb, all right? So this is a good example of how I could use three commas in a sentence. And you know, this is just because of the adverb at the beginning of the sentence because I said, unfortunately, I'm using a comma. Anytime we start a sentence with an L-Y word, you know, we're gonna use a comma real quick, just to start. And then we've got this extra information part, which is gonna use two commas and now we've got a good example. Now, I could make this a decent four comma example and this is again, this is not what I would normally recommend to do. I don't think this is a great way to write, but okay. So say for example, I did this, right? I added another piece of extra information, right? And again, I use another comma for that. So I could have two pieces of extra information. One is in the middle, so I have two. One is at the end, so I have one there. One is at the beginning, here. I wouldn't normally write this sentence this way though. I don't think this is the best way to write because you're kind of like, you're not following a consistent line of logic, but this could be okay. You know, I could accept this if they were asking you what to do here or maybe here. You know, you could say, all right, well, all this is okay. So I'll throw in another comma, okay? This will be a couple of examples of where you could use more, but generally speaking, you're gonna wanna limit your comma use. I would say most of the time in the SAT, if I see more than three, I should be immediately suspicious. I should probably assume it's the wrong answer. You normally need less of these. We're gonna see some examples, some more examples of this today, but generally speaking, what they're looking for is to see if you know where to put these and when to put these, okay? So a lot of times, let me give you some examples of just one comma that are good, you know? Okay, so these are all just examples of how I would use one comma right after starting the sentence with like a connecting word or a time word here, like after the party, we all went home for our wedding. We did a rehearsal dinner when I was 19, I moved to Peru. I could also just write these the other way, right? And this is now just a period, right? That would be okay. But if I have those words first, if I have that time word first, I'm gonna wanna have my comma in the middle, right? We see the same thing with other connectors, like when you saw the example with although, right? We saw that in one of the PDF examples, right? Whatever, I'm just paraphrasing. So again, I have a connector first and then I have this comma in the middle. So that's another good rule to keep in mind. If you see a connecting word, maybe at the start of the sentence, they might ask you about what to do here. And so you might wanna have just one comma in the middle. For example, that could be a situation that comes up. Juliana, you got a question? Yeah, are there any transition words that need to have a comma after them? Like immediately after the word? Yeah. Yes, there are a couple of cases like that. One of those I would say that's very common is however. So I usually use that at the start of a sentence and then immediately after it, I use a comma, right? The same is true for nevertheless, which as we saw is very similar to however. So you would use a comma after that. And then like I said, all the L-Y words, like if you say unfortunately, curiously, interestingly, you're gonna use a comma after those, right? So remember your L-Y words, which are called adverbs. So remember that. Those are the main ones. Yeah. Thank you. You're welcome. So this is something that we're gonna have to keep practicing obviously as we go, but it's something that I wanna draw attention to because I think that a lot of the punctuation questions are related to commas. And I think that it's one of the things that we typically don't have the best formation for. Like we tend to screw this up a lot just because of how we might have learned in school or what we didn't learn in school. And I know even for myself, I've had to like review the rules a little bit because it's easy to get into like bad habits and not fully understand that you're doing something wrong. It feels okay to you because you've been doing it for a long time and maybe nobody ever corrected you. So we're gonna pay some attention to those comma questions, okay? So like I said, you need less of those than you think you do. You're gonna want to probably have less commas than you might want, okay? Hopefully we'll get a little more accustomed to that as we go through. And again, if you guys want any examples or any more explanation of any of these things, just tell me, feel free to interrupt and say, hey, raise your hand or whatever because I wanna make sure that everything's clear. So getting back to the other punctuation marks we need to know. These are like the more advanced ones that you need to be familiar with, okay? Because these are the other ones that appear on the SAT. So again, we got our period comma apostrophe and then we've also got these four. This one here is called the M dash. It's called that because it's about the same width as the letter M when you type. It's like a big fat dash, kind of like the one that goes between words, but it's bigger. We got the colon, semicolon and parentheses. So I wanna start with the M dash because the M dash doesn't actually have any special function that only it can do. It's like a weird replacement option. It's the veggie burger of punctuation. Like you can totally eat a normal burger or you can ask them to switch it for the veggie burger, but nobody really wants a veggie burger deep down. Like, even vegetarians are like, all right, fine, I'll take it. The M dash does not have any unique special, I have to use it here function, okay? But it does replace other kinds of punctuations for different things. And that's what the SAT likes to do. It likes to mess with you. It likes to be like, which is the correct answer? And the correct answer might be an M dash replacing something else, okay? So it's good to know what it's for and how we use it, but just keep in mind that like, it's a punctuation you probably have never used and don't need to use, but it might be the right answer. So we have to know how it works. Colon is one of my favorites. We use that to sort of define the previous clause or the thing we just said. And you don't have to have a complete clause after it. You could just put a single word. I can show you some examples of that in a second. This one shows up from time to time, not too often, kind of a medium frequency. I don't see a lot of questions with this. Semi colon, I hate these personally, but the semi colon is sometimes on the SAT. It will be used before connectors, okay? If they're in like the middle of a sentence and they wanna kind of add on to the sentence, they'll put this before the connector and it could replace a period in that sense. I'll show you maybe a couple of examples of that. So it typically joins two sentences about the same idea. I don't generally prefer to do it this way, but it is possible and I'll show you in a second what I mean. Parentheses are also to add extra information. You can use them a lot like you would use two commas, but the difference is like, it can be a little more off topic. Usually parentheses is less serious. It's more like kind of a random thought. It's not meant to maybe be the most important information. So if it's less important or if it's off topic or if it's like the writer's personal thoughts, I might use a parentheses instead of using commas or the M dash, which can replace it. Also we use parentheses, especially when we're talking about abbreviations or dates. That's the custom, like if you wanna mention, I don't know, the dates that someone was alive, you would put that in parentheses right after their name. You wouldn't use other kinds of punctuation for that. So that's kind of one of the specific things we typically do with parentheses. I'll show you a few examples real fast here of how some of those look so that you can see what I mean. Because I think it's important to see sort of how these go. And then we're gonna do a little practice with these and see if we can do it. So let's go over here. So using, I wanna start with the colon first and then I'll show you how, after using some of these, I'll show you how you can use the M dashes to sort of replace those. So colons are again, typically defined the thing we just said, right? Okay, so let's say I have this sentence right here. Everything seemed to be going great, but deep down there was a big problem, right? Now, I could make another sentence here and be like, that problem was, explain what it was. That's one way to do it. But you know, it would be a lot more cooler, like if I just did this, I did a colon. You know, mom, mom was the big problem. Mom sometimes becoming down too hard on people, right? So I can do this. I can literally just put the colon at the end. And now I'm answering that question of like, what was the big problem? Mom, you know, in my case, she always said my room was dirty. And even though it wasn't, it'd be like one piece of paper on the floor and she would get mad. I was like, well, it's a small room. You notice the paper. What do you want me to do? So I could just do that. That's perfectly acceptable, right? I could also make a more full complete thing here if I wanted to, right? The doctor had bad news. I don't know, right? Doctor had bad news. Like now I'm sort of setting up this problem and trying to build some tension a little bit with this. So you just wanna use this to essentially define the thing you just said. If you finish this sentence here, your next question is what? What's the big problem? So you can answer that immediately with this, right? And you could just again, use a single word. You could use a small sentence. Generally though, you don't wanna do a big long sentence after a colon. Don't like the ideas to keep it short. Usually keep it short after you do this, right? So I'm gonna leave that example for now. Sorry, mom. Show you an example of the semi colon and how we might have used that. Let's see. I think however could be a good choice for that. So, okay. This is how I would prefer to write these two sentences. I would say a lot of people are bad at saving money. Bull stop, period. However, comma, there are apps now that let you save small amounts easily. Cool. Another way to do this is to use a semi colon here and then not capitalize this and still use your comma. I personally hate this, but it is acceptable. And sometimes this will be the best answer on the SAT. So just know that, that you can put this semi colon before those connectors that you would put at the start of the sentence. So if for some reason they're like, if you got this, right? And they give you, let's say there's a blank space here. Right? And they're asking us, what's the best way? I would probably suggest the best answer would be a period and then the word however, and then the comma, but maybe that's not a choice. Maybe that's not the options they give us. So remember, we have to pick the best answer from the list we got. And maybe the list we got didn't include what I considered to be the best answer, not that I'm the authority on writing or anything, but still. So if I see this, I would go, okay, that's acceptable. That is acceptable, right? This would also be acceptable. They're probably never going to give you both of these at the same time though, because they're both technically okay. And it's kind of subjective as to whether one is better than the other. I personally hate semicolons, but there are other people who love them. I assume those people are psychopaths, but I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. So just understand that you can use the semicolon to replace a period if you're trying to connect two sentences that would have been totally fine as two separate sentences. I know it's a little confusing. We'll see some examples today to help out. And then parentheses, like I said, extra information. If I go back to this, for example, this example that I gave you with four commas, I could technically turn this into parentheses instead of commas, you know? But that changes the feeling a little bit. Like now this detail seems like it's less important. It kind of seems like it's an extra thought that I didn't need. And I feel like that detail was kind of important for this sentence, because we're literally saying this prince was in exile and then he got assassinated. So the detail about running away from his country seems pretty important to me. I would probably want to make sure that that's given fair consideration, right? But we could use parentheses for extra information. That's one way we can do it, you know? Now a good place to maybe add some parentheses in some of these things, if I want to add some extra information, like, you know, the birth year, right? Like, I think it was, I don't know. I think they sometimes use that, right? Well, maybe let's pretend he had a range of years, right? People didn't live that long back then. So we'll just give him 24. All right, so like we're telling me here how long this person lived, right? The prince, 1024 to 1048, he was 24 years old, you know? That was not bad for life expectancy back then. So there's a little extra detail that I can add. For example here, that would be acceptable. That can go before the comma as well. That's okay, you know? I could also maybe throw in here, right? I don't know. The name of the kingdom or something if I wanted to, right? With just a little detail. So again, I want to use parentheses for extra information, but like, you know, stuff that's not the most important details, things that are kind of optional details that I didn't have to present necessarily. So, you know, it could be a little more off topic. It could be a short detail piece of information. So now I want to talk about those M dashes for a second. The M dash can essentially do what parentheses do. It can do what a colon does and it can do what commas do. It's just a matter of choice. It's a matter of preference. So I could take these commas and replace them with M dashes. I don't know why it highlighted it. There we go. All right, so I could replace these with M dashes. That is perfectly correct. So a hundred percent correct. There's nothing wrong with that. I could take my colon example and I could replace that with a M dash. That's perfectly correct. There's nothing wrong with doing that. Um, what else are there to be? I could also replace this comma with M dashes if I really wanted to and then just finish my sentence with a period. That's okay too. Nothing wrong with doing that. That's how it works. You just replace things. It replaces commas for extra information. It replaces, you know, it can replace parentheses for extra information. It can replace a colon when you want to add that quick definition. That is all acceptable. And because like I said, it has no specific purpose of its own, a lot of people don't use them. I'm one of the people that doesn't use it. I don't really like it. My personal preference, I don't use them. Some people do. If you want to see some examples, there's a website I like to recommend that I would encourage you to read a little bit every day just to get familiar with this because I can guarantee you, I've done this a bunch of times in my classes, but I'll show you real quick. This website Vox is a news website. For some reason they love M dashes. They're like, I don't know if, look there's one in the title right there. I feel confident that I can click on just about any article here and I will find examples of M dashes. There's one right there in the first paragraph. There's one third paragraph. There's one, there's another one. Like they use it all the time on this site. I don't know why they love it so much, but they do. So you can kind of read articles in here and I think you'll get a feeling for like where they use them. It's a good place to see it in action and get comfortable. Like if I look at this sentence, right? This is also a good example of parentheses. When the US Consumer Product Safety Commission or CPSC were introducing the abbreviation announced in mid-December, would consider this first ever health regulations that guest does. Why am I using a comma there? Can anybody tell me? Why are they using a comma? What do you think? I remember what we see. Could be extra information, but actually there's something else that's important. Remember what we said. If the sentence starts with, look at the first half of the sentence. Oh, is that transition? Okay, it's helping us to sort of, this first part is setting up the context. It's telling us when. Anytime I see when, before, after or any kind of phrase that sort of indicates the context, I'm gonna use a comma after that part. So when the US CPSC announced in mid-December, comma, it was the start of what will be a very long journey to any kind of restrictions. Now, here is extra information. One that will consider public comment, including from the gas industry in determining the approach. So they're giving extra information here about this very long journey to restrictions. Like if we wanna have restrictions on these gas stoves, then it's gonna have a lot of, there's a lot of things involved. They added this information. So this M dash is acting like a comma. Now, some people like to use these here because look how they have other commas. Remember what we said about the number of commas? You don't wanna have too many. So sometimes it's a good idea to mix it up. Like they already had one and then two and then three in this sentence. This would have been number four. I told you we don't like four. So right here, they're like, all right, we'll change it to an M dash to get like that extra information and change it up a little bit. But this could be a comma, it could be, it'll be fine. There's nothing wrong with that. It would be a lot of commas in a sentence. So maybe that's why they prefer to do this. But the point I wanna make with these is just that they replace commas for extra information. They replace parentheses for extra information and they replace colons when you want to like define something that you just said. So you can use this instead of those, all right? And sometimes the right answer in the SAT questions are going to do exactly that. So far, any questions about the punctuations? We're gonna do some practice stuff in a second, but I wanted to hear from you first. So again, we saw period comma, apostrophe, M dash, colons, semicolon parentheses. Any questions so far? All right, if not, then let's take a little break. We're gonna take 10 minutes, okay? And then we'll get back to work. So yeah, it's 413, so 423. I'll see you back here. All right, we're back. We're gonna go ahead and do some punctuation practice now and I wanna go over real quick the questions. Let me get a show of hands to make sure you guys are still here. Just give me a raised hand if you guys are here. You're back, you're ready to go. Wanna make sure we're good. Love what I see. I love them all going up. Beautiful. Excellent, eh? Let's go. All right, you'll love to see it. Good stuff. Okay, thank you very much. All right, excellent. Now, let's just talk real quick then. So, we understand a little bit about how these punctuations work. We're gonna try to put it into practice, but I wanna talk about how we can identify these questions on the SAT, because again, we gotta implement our strategy. What's the first step of the strategy? Right, we wanna find out the type of question. So we gotta look at the question first, right? That's step one. We're gonna identify the type of question and we do that so that we can what? What's step three? Arianna? Decide how much you wanna read. That's right, we gotta decide how much we gotta read. Exactly, so we're gonna scan the question, then we're gonna go ahead and figure out what type of question it is, scan to figure out, like, then decide how much to read, right? And that way, we can extract the information and record our answer, all right? We gotta remember that five-step process. That's how we're gonna do every single question, okay? So, this one makes it fairly easy because it always uses the same phrase. You're always gonna see this phrase. Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of standard English, all right? Standard English, American English, the best English, all right? So, that's how you're gonna see it, but there is one little problem and that is that we use the same phrase also for grammar questions. So, both punctuation questions and grammar questions, which we will get to on the next class, use this same phrase. So, we're gonna make a small modification to our approach, right? So, let's take a look at this example, all right? This is a punctuation example. Again, just as always, I wanna do step number one. Look at the question. I see it says, okay, which choice completes the... Standard English, that's my magic words. That's the key words, I see those. Now, that could be punctuation. It could be vocabulary. Or sorry, excuse me, it could be grammar. It could be grammar, it could be punctuation. Here's how I know. I look here now at the answers real quick and I see that the only thing that changes in all of the answers is punctuation. In this case, the only thing that's changing are the commas. So, all I gotta do now is figure out which part I need to read. And when it comes to punctuation, I only need to read the like, I don't even need the whole sentence, just the area around the blank, okay? I don't care at all about this first sentence of this paragraph. It is completely worthless to me. It is a waste of my time. I don't even really care about recently engineer or what it says down here at the bottom. I'm just looking at this. So it says, all right, Eric Frankberg of Tampere University in Finland used the chemical blank to make a glassy solid. That's the only part I need to worry about. So now I'm taking a look at this. I see the blank here, it says to make. A good rule of thumb is I don't want to put commas before the word to or before my verbs. I usually don't wanna do that. So I would automatically think, okay, I probably don't wanna use C or B because those have commas right before to make. That's kind of weird. The other thing is this part here where it says the chemical because it says the chemical, I assume that we're just talking about one chemical. It's not like A chemical, which could be many different things. It's one specific chemical. So in this case, I actually don't need any commas. The best answer is this one, D, compound aluminum oxide. And I think a lot of times this is where people will make the mistake and mark C, because they'll be like, oh, it's like the compound. Now I'm gonna put the name of the compound in the commas. And you really don't need to do that here. It's not necessary. You're just adding extra punctuation for no good reason. And again, we think about how many commas we have in this sentence. If I back up before I drew all my lines, recently comma, Erika Frankfurt of Tampere University. So I already have one. And again, I would be hesitant to have a lot of commas. I don't generally want to have three or four commas in my final sentence. So knowing that too is a clue. I can say, okay, I definitely don't wanna have a comma before the word to make. That doesn't really usually work well in English. And I know that it's saying does. So I can probably get away with just saying the compound aluminum oxide. And D is my final answer. And there we go. But again, the important thing to practice here today while we're working on these is, practicing this method, question, identify the type. If I have to check the answers here just to make sure I understand what to look for, okay. Focus on the part of the sentence where the blank is. And then choose the right answer. So that's how we got to approach all of these questions, okay. Yeah, we'll stop there for now. We'll get to grammar another day. Let's go ahead and do some practice with these, okay. I'm gonna drop in our group and in our chat here, punctuation set one. Let me see your faces, all right. I wanna make sure we're all here and working. I'm gonna send it in the chat too, since that's sometimes convenient for people I realize. So this has just five questions, five punctuation questions. Again, we have one minute, 10 seconds, but we should be able to do these faster. I'm still gonna be generous today since we're working with some new stuff. We'll set a five minute timer, okay. I wanna see you while you work. I like to see you while you work. I like to see your faces. I like to see your thinking faces. You guys look funny when you're sitting there thinking. You're like scratching your heads real hard and stuff. There's Tyler's thinking face too. Looking good. You're looking more and more Mexican by the day, Tyler. Just saying that. So, all right. Tyler may someday be teaching you guys this class, so that's why he's hanging out here. He's not taking the SAT with you guys, don't worry. So, all right. So I got a timer set for five minutes. Does everybody have their file? Are we good to go? We just, you can give me a visual confirmation. We're all good. I wanna make sure I don't cut you guys too for short. I'll give you like another minute to get it open and ready to go. That's the punctuation set one. And again, it's five questions all about punctuation. Let's see what you guys can do. All right, so I'm gonna start the five minute timer now. Let's go. Yeah, once you have your five complete, you can send them to me in the chat privately so I can check them out. All right, that is five minutes. Goes by fast, doesn't it? I like that about this new test. You know, we used to have to like freaking sit here and wait for 20 minutes while you guys were at a whole freaking text that was the size of a whole page. It's so much better now, it's so less lame. All right, I got almost everybody. I think I'm missing one here. And if you don't have it yet, just send me what you got. Don't be shy. It's okay if you didn't finish yet, we're working on that. But I think I got almost everybody here. All right, let's start taking a look. So again, that was five minutes. You have five minutes and 50 seconds in real life to do all that. So ideally we should be getting faster. We wanna be better than the time we need because we wanna be able to save some of that time. If you think these are hard, wait till you see what we got coming up next. So let's take a look at these together a little bit real quick and we'll move on to the next thing. So the first one here, kind of like similar to that example I just showed you in the slides but there's a little twist to this one. So it says a new compound blank. Now I'm looking through the answers. It looks like everybody said B. Yeah, I don't see any disagreement there. And I would agree. Now in the example I showed you in the slides it said the chemical compound aluminum oxide with no commas but in this case it says a new compound and also it's using a formal noun. It's like a formal name. It's a brand name. So it might make more sense in this case to separate that name with the commas, right? To make it really clear what that name is. It's like a new thing. We haven't heard about it before. It's got a specific brand name. So if you said B comma, grapple flex comma then that's a good answer. I would say that's the right answer here for that situation. Now look at it number two. I think this is where we're gonna have the most division. All right, I see some B's. I see some C's. I see an A. I see a D. Yay, I love it when everybody's got different answers. That's a lot of fun. All right, so let's take a look at these. Let's think about what we talked about before. So I'm looking here when I see the question. I see standard English. I'm looking and I see the only difference. Everything uses whereas, but the difference is the punctuation. So I just wanna go and kind of like look down, just read the sentence. I'm just gonna go to this sentence, which for some reason really hard to select sometimes. It doesn't always wanna like select it, but whatever. Okay, so it says, for example, Hawk will sort out and hide into the sky and swoop down to catch his prey. Blank a sparrow usually stays close to the ground and puts from tree branch to tree branch. All right, so now let's take a look at these. I would not want to use A because I'm not gonna put a connecting word in between two commas. Okay, we're not gonna do that. So those connectors, they can be at the start of the sentence, which means that they are after a period. We also talked about how we could connect them using a semicolon. That's an option in some cases. So if you were thinking maybe B could work, I think that has some potential in this case. At the same time, some of our connectors don't require that punctuation at all, as a matter of fact. For example, I could also use another word here, while, or even the word but with one T, big difference. So I could say, you know, a hawk will sort hide in the sky and swoop down to catch his prey, but a sparrow usually stays close to the ground or swoop down to catch its prey while a sparrow. I could use a few different simpler, you know, connecting words. And whereas is one of those words, whereas is a word where I actually don't need to necessarily have the punctuation there. So I could really just probably leave it blank. C would be the best answer. Less is more in this case. Now, if it was a bigger, like a more complex connector, like meanwhile, however, then I would recommend the semicolon before and then the word and then a comma. I would personally recommend a period and then the connector because I think that's better, but that's just my personal preference. So in this case, I don't really want to use, I'm not going to use that semicolon so much here because as it stands, there's also not a lot of other punctuation here and we're just comparing two different things. It's not like I'm setting up like a whole new sentence. I'm comparing two things. I don't want to break it up with a stronger punctuation like a semicolon or a period. I just want to keep it flowing, keep it flowing nice and smooth. So yeah, a lot of people miss that one. Again, maybe whereas is a good word for you to study. I think we saw some errors on the previous stuff where we looked at with that too. So in the vocabulary, we had that word too. So that's one that we might want to practice more. Look at number three. I'm looking at your answers. I see some C's. I see some B's. I see a lot of B's. I see a few C's. Looks like just B's for the most part. A couple C's. All right, let's take a look at these. So it's at the end of the sentence. So I can just, again, I'm just going to read like this right here. I don't care about anything else. None of the... If you spent time reading about the Incan Empire, I'm sure you love to hear about it, but don't waste your time, guys. Don't waste your time, okay? All right. Although they were eventually defeated by European forces, remnants of their culture still exists today throughout Latin America blank. Now, there's a few different options here. We've got parentheses. We've got a comma. We've got a semicolon and we got a colon. Now, look at this. Let's go process of elimination for a second. I don't think this is just like a side point that I would want in parentheses. You know, it doesn't seem like something you... You wouldn't really throw parentheses right there at the end of the sentence, at the end of the paragraph. That just seems kind of weird and it doesn't seem like it's like a side note for some like unimportant detail. So I don't think A is a good choice. B, illustrating the profound impact of town history, the comma, that could work, that could be okay. C, with a semicolon doing the same kind of thing, why would I want to use a semicolon there? Because I feel like if I use that, it's going to be to make like a new sentence almost, you know? Although they're eventually defeated by European forces, remnants of their culture still exists today throughout Latin America. Semicolon and they're in... I would probably want to use a connector after a semicolon, you know? And this illustrates the importance of it to world history or something like that. So I don't have a connector and that's the thing. Remember I said like, we want to use semicolons usually before connectors that require them. So I wouldn't probably use the semicolon there too much. I don't think a colon makes sense either. It's just, you know, it's not defining, right? Throughout Latin America, like it wouldn't make sense to add that there. So we'll see, B looks pretty good to me. I think you just keep it simple here. Comma's good, one comma's fine. We only had one other comma in this sentence. Two commas is a good number, okay? So that's probably okay. That's the keep it simple. Look at number four. All right, I see some C's, I see some D's. I see some, a lot of D's and C's. Okay, it's pretty much a split between D and C. I want to hear some different opinions on this one. Kind of curious. So, Mariana, you said D, why? I thought D because, well, we already know that a vector is however, so we know that we can use it with a period or a semicolon and a comma. So I thought that, well, the other, the only answer was that one, the semicolon and the comma. And it connects the first class to the second class. Well, it doesn't make a lot of like completion. All right, I think your logic is pretty good there. I would like to hear an argument though, maybe for another answer since I saw a few different ones. But Olo, you mentioned possibly C, what do you think about that one? Yeah, I'm not sure, but I just think because I don't think it could be like a column because I think it's kind of like a connector that doesn't need it, it's like, well, with that, that will never be, I wasn't sure which is separate too much the ideas, probably if the semicolon was before. And I would really was in between the other C or D and I decided it might be really just because. All right, so I think it's good that you're using that process of elimination. We're gonna talk about how we can really use that a lot in some of our other question types, but I think it's important to try to do that if you're not sure, at least get it down to that 50-50 choice. If you get it down to two choices and it's a coin flip, that's okay, you know? So thinking about what we said before, if I have the choice, let's say we narrow it down. I agree with your analysis of A and B. I don't wanna put a semicolon after a connector. I use semicolons before connectors if I'm gonna use them. So I don't wanna use B, A doesn't make sense because it would have to be referring to the darkest times. It would have to explain what those times were. Like if it said darkest times colon, the United States Civil War, great answer because that's what it was. That would explain the darkest times, but it doesn't do that. So that's not what's gonna work. So it's gotta be C or D. Now, thinking about back to what we said about the semicolons, I can use them before some of those bigger connectors. And after I use however, I'm always gonna have a comma. So knowing that detail, I need the punctuation on both sides here. I could have done a period, but I didn't. So I think my entire explanation was really good about that. Like that's exactly what I wanna do. He got to do us through some of our darkest times, semicolon. However, comma, his own life was far from easy, right? So again, it's that style choice of I could have just made those two separate sentences with a period, but I didn't. So that's the best answer. So yeah, I'm gonna go with D right there. All right, Michelle, tell me what you think for number five. So for number five, I chose C. Yeah, there it is. This guy right here. Okay, why did that make sense for you? Okay, can you move on, please? Sure. Yes, so it says three factors. I think it makes sense to mention what those factors are. So that there's the need of the two points. You got it. I think most everybody looking at your answers looks like almost everybody got this one good. So that's excellent. Like exactly three factors. If you're reading this, again, I identify the question. I know I'm dealing with punctuation. Obviously I'm making it really easy for you guys because I'm putting a big, big word that says punctuation on here, but that won't be the case with SATs. These are the practice runs. We're gonna eventually start mixing these up. I'm just gonna read this. I really only need to read the first line here, like just this stuff right here. If you read more, you wasted time. Okay, so I just look at this. And if you finish reading due to three factors, your brain should immediately go, what three factors? And so that's how you know, if you're asking that question right away, that's a good time to put the colon there, right? Using the comma could work, but it's not the best choice, right? Semicolon is not used for that. I wouldn't wanna use that there. And I need some punctuation. It wouldn't make sense to say three factors and just go straight to cleanliness, okay? So C is your best choice, right? So that's a case where, you know, I don't think using the commas would be the best choice. I think colon is a much better choice in this case. And we definitely need some punctuation to separate this idea, because right here I could put a period. I could finish the sentence right there, two to three factors period. And then my next sentence could explain what those are. But in this case, I'm trying to kind of keep it more short and direct, get to the point. And so I'm using the colon immediately after factors to explain what those factors are. And that's another good way to test the colon punctuation. Like, if I see factors, colon, the next words should be the factors, okay? That's what they should be. Like I'm trying to define the thing I just said. So if you're not doing that, then something's off. But you should catch that pattern of how to use those, right? So that was just a little bit of practice with those today. We're gonna do more of these as we go. Like I said, this is gonna become a regular thing, working with these different kinds of punctuations and these different exercises. So I wanna throw down one more thing. We're gonna start working on some more vocabulary and then we'll finish that off a little bit more in the next class. I don't think I have, yeah, that's on my list. All right, I'm gonna drop another set of vocabulary exercises on you. I sent them in the chat, sent them in the group. You got them in both places, okay? So just like we did with the first set, we've got a section here to work on the definitions and then practice putting them in a sentence. So first I just want you to do the definition. So go ahead and take a few minutes to try to put those definitions in. If you're not sure what they are, it's okay. Try to figure out where they might go. And then if you get it wrong, that's fine. Or if you wanna look up the definition, fine, but at least try to put them in yourself. Okay, try to figure it out for yourself before you just go Google everything. We gotta try to stretch our brains, all right? So this one has acumen, ameliorate, conundrum, detrimental, erudite and transigent, ostentatious and precarious. Okay, so I'm gonna give you five minutes to work on those definitions and we'll check them out together. All right, that was five minutes. Let's see if we can figure these out. If you don't have them all done, that's all right. We're gonna keep moving a little bit. We've got a lot of stuff to do. Let's see here. I wanna call some people for some things. But I can see it's go, give me any definition you want. Freebie, you pick. Oh, okay, the first one is ameliorate. Okay, ameliorate to make better or to improve. That is correct. Very good. Yeah, it's like the same word in Italian, funny enough. I learned that in Italian class. Yeah, ameliorate to make something better or to improve it. All right, I like that one. Thank you. Let's see here. Clarice, tell me what you think for the second one. Detrimental. All right, detrimental, right? Something detrimental, something harmful or damaging, bad for you, you know, something along those lines. All right, good. Julianne, give me another one. A difficult problem or riddle, conundrum. All right, good. A difficult problem or riddle, a conundrum. Yes, you have a conundrum. You don't know what to do. All right, I like that. Julianne, how would you define unwilling or unwilling to compromise or change one's views? Yeah, it's intransigent. Very good, intransigent. Yeah, that's a tricky word. Did you just know that one? No, I had to look it up. OK, all right, it's cool. I was just curious. Something I want to point out real quick with that word, like sometimes obviously on the test, you don't have a dictionary and you don't get to Google. So if you do see some words that maybe you're not so familiar with, sometimes you can take a second to just try to break them down a little bit, maybe get an idea of what it means. Like I'll be honest, I had to look that definition up myself just to refresh my memory. But I had a good idea that it was that answer because in trends, like I see the transport, I think, OK, transfer, transition, transportation, like we usually think about that as something changing or moving. And then that in part can mean like the negative, like if you're incapable, right, you can't do something. So I kind of thought about that and thought, OK, maybe that could be then that not wanting to change or not wanting to like move a perspective. And I also thought about the gent part is sometimes going with your mind like intelligent. So I tried to break it down into parts and get an idea of what it might have been. And then I Googled it and I was on the right track. So yeah, that can help you sometimes. All right. So we saw a malaria, we saw conundrum, we saw detrimental, we saw intransigent. Michelle, what about precarious? Not securely held or in a position, dangerously likely default. OK, good. Yeah, kind of dangerous. It's in a dangerous position, right? It could fall, it could break. It's dangling off the edge of the cliff, you know? All right, good. Adanza, give me anyone you want. Well, wait. Characterized by great knowledge, scholarly, erudite. OK, erudite. Yes. Yeah, that's an old Latin word. It means that you're not rude, that you've been educated. So yeah, it means you're usually we refer to something as an erudite, is somebody very smart, very educated, kind of like a scholarly person, right? Very like an old professor at the university could be erudite. All right. Mariana, what about acumen? Kindness and depth of understanding, insight or discernment. Yeah, you got a sharp eye, you got acumen. You're like very precise, very intelligent for, you know, picking things up quickly or identifying what things are. OK, good. And then I think that just leaves us with ostentatious, which would be showy, designed to impress others. You're trying to show off your ostentatious, right? That guy that rolls up in the yellow Ferrari, like showing off all these guys, being very ostentatious. Maybe that's what you think of. I always think it's good to try to picture some of these things. Imagine them in your head. Helps you remember. Now, Monday, we're going to have English tomorrow's math, OK? Monday, though, we're going to be doing English from now on. So the Monday classes are going to be with me. And then Wednesday, Thursday is going to be double math days, because honestly, the math stuff, I think, is harder than the English stuff. As we go, if you feel like you need more English prep and maybe you want less math prep, we might be able to start, like, make some flex days towards the end of the program. We're going to always try to be flexible with you people. So just tell me if you need something. But next week, you know, each Monday, we're going to cover new question types and talk about the strategies for each one and practice the ones we did before to where I hope the last couple of weeks are just lots of practice with lots of different questions so that we can get really ready for the test, OK? So please try to be here every session that you can. And thank you for being here today. I appreciate it. So I will see you on Monday. And Pili, we'll see you tomorrow. Thank you, bye. Bye. Bye.