 to the stream, everybody. Welcome to all you people. I already see people waiting here and I appreciate you. I'm so happy that you're here. Makes me happy that you're in the house, you know. Thank you so much for being here. Today, the whole purpose of the stream today is to answer your questions, give you that last minute advice that you need. I got a blue book open if you want to look at stuff there. I got all my materials ready. If there's any you want to ask about, I got my pen out here. I can illustrate some things for you, punctuation, grammar, whatever you want. This is your chance. You get to ask stuff. Yeah, I got the chat over here on this monitor. I got my stream stuff over here. We're ready to go. We're doing the thing. You're welcome, random guy. I'm glad you're here. Thank you. Same. What's good? Yo, yo, yo. I love it. Garlic Boy was up in here in the chat too, already waiting. I don't know how to cap up. There's letters I don't know how to pronounce on some of your names. It's a wild thing doing this and dealing with all the international people. I love it. It's so cool. I've gotten to talk to so many cool people from so many different places. Love y'all. What's up, Oiya? How we doing? All right. Looking good. Yeah. You tell me what you need. We do things. That's the plan today, because this is the last thing. Grammar revision. You got anything in particular you want to look at? There's a lot of things that go into grammar. What's up, Queen? I see you, Jamila. What's happening? Yeah, grammar could be a good thing to look at a little bit. I can give you a couple of general pointers that might be helpful. I'm writing down things too, as people say them. I got my sticky notes here. I'm just taking some notes on what you guys would like to see today. Punctuation too. Yeah, that's always a big one. I know it's 7.30 p.m. in India. I know. I put that in that post that I made last week, because I was thinking about all the wonderful people on the other side of the planet. I normally stream in the afternoons. I was like, no, I got to stream in my morning time so that you people can actually see this before you take the test. Otherwise, big waste of time. Get the March digital SAT questions. I don't think you can. Everybody has different questions. Keep that in mind. There's at least 20 different versions of the test. Your questions would be different from other people's questions. It's impossible for you to actually get the previous test because nobody took the same test. It's not like before where you could get the leaked version of the test. That's one of the reasons they went to digital. I don't think there's much you can do here. 3 p.m. in the UK. What's good? All right. Nice to see you here. Transitions with grammar. We got some transition stuff, punctuation stuff, grammar stuff. I think we can get into a little bit of the grammar stuff to start out. Maybe if you got any specific punctuations or specific things that you're looking for, let me know. Punctuating transition words. Yeah, that's always a tricky boy. We can look at that. The two options for paired passages. We can look at that a little bit too. Paired passages can be a little bit annoying. Fortunately, I've only seen two or maybe three on any test. That's not one that you need to worry about too much. Punctuating some series of things. Commas. Yeah, commas. Everybody hates commas. You don't get a hard module first. The first module is always going to be... This is for Leo. The first module is always the same. It's a balanced module, and then the second one changes depending on what you get. You always want to get that hard module on the second part because that means you're going to get more score, essentially. Yeah, and Laxie, you're more than welcome, and I'm happy it's helping you out. Yeah, let's say... Hey, we're all struggling with this new format, so we got to do what we got to do. You still got time to catch up, Laxie. Super score phenom. Real quick, super score is something that universities do automatically for you. When you self-report your scores, you can report your best English and your best math score. If those were on two different tests, you can super score. What that does is... If I got 700 in English and then 600 in math on March, so I got 1,300. Then the next time I take it, it's the opposite. I got 600 in English, 700 in math. Well, they would take my two 700s and put them together and give me 1,400. They're essentially taking the best result from different tests, putting them together, but that's something that universities will do automatically when they receive your final scores. It's not something that every university does, so just keep that in mind. Yeah, you can show a picture of your thing on your phone, bang. That's cool. Nothing to worry about there. All right, semi-colon, complex list. What's up, Mert? Okay, cool. All right, let's get into some of this grammar and punctuation stuff, I think. We can talk about that. As far as Bruce's comment about it being a bit unfair, it is a little bit unfair, to be honest, because it introduces some randomness to the whole thing. What if you get more questions of a certain type that you're not good at? You could get unlucky. From what I can tell, the general distribution of questions is the same, but yeah, you might get a vocab question with a word that you don't know and somebody else might not. It's just unlucky sometimes, so that's how it is. This is what it be these days. Times are tough. All right, I want to jump into this a little bit and just, I'm going to scribble out a couple things related to grammar and a couple things related to some punctuation here. Again, regarding grammar, I think one of the things that's important to know about here is our subject verb agreement. When we talk about grammar on the SAT, this is one of the most common things that they do is subject verb agreement. It's one of the easiest things, so I think we should just knock this out quick. Again, the idea is that you have a subject, you have a verb, and they have to agree in terms of the grammar. English, like other languages, has conjugations. It has different forms of verbs for different people, not to the same degree as Spanish or French or something where it changes for every possible person. In English, this is actually really limited. It only happens in present tense, so you don't have to, well, and also present perfect, but literally only present tenses are ones you need to worry about. So we'll just stick with that example. If I have he, she, or an it, then I say is, but if it's a you, or a we, or they, then it becomes are. The same thing happens with other verbs. I would say he, she, or it works with the s, or I would just say work for a you, we, or they. So in present tense, we have this. What you'll see a lot on the SAT, I find is that they will have like one option that works with a he, she, it, and then they will have like three options that would work with a you, we, they, and it's really just as simple as picking the one that's different because that's what they're trying to do. Like they'll have these in different tenses. They'll say, Oh, worked. They'll say work and worked and will work. And they'll give you like these three forms and what they're doing is trying to trick you. Like you're thinking, Oh, do I have to look at the past? Do I have to look at the future? Do I have to choose the right tense? No, you don't. All you got to do is choose the one that matches the subject. So just focus on this. So if the subject is a he, a she, or an it, then make sure you have the verb to match. And that's usually how these questions go. Sometimes it's the opposite. Sometimes you're going to get like, you know, your subject is a you, we, they, and so you need to pick this one and they might give you a few different alternatives here. They might say works or is working or has worked. Like you might have these three options, right? So if you had these three options, let me, let me slide this over just a little bit more so you can see where I'm writing. Like if you had these three options, all three of these work with he, she, it. So the correct answer is probably the one that doesn't. Like it's probably just work. Like that's generally how these grammar or subject verb agreement questions go. So don't overthink these. Don't worry about them too much. Like you're literally just trying to match up with the subject. Now, where that gets a little tricky to be fair is sometimes they will, you know, hide the subject, right? They're going to try to hide it from you. So like they might say, for example, the, I don't know, I'm just making something out of the top of my head, right? So if I have this, right? Like, and let's say I'll just scribble down some options real quick here. I could say like want, wants wanted and will want. Sure. We'll just do it like this. Okay. So the thing is here, all I got it, like the bottom line is we can look at the, we don't even need to worry about the context. We just need to figure out what the subject is here. And they hide it like this because what they're doing is saying, like, Oh, they're making you think, Oh, I should look at workers and you'll say, Oh, workers want. Oh, easy. But that's not true because that's not the subject of this sentence. In this case, the subject is the committee of workers. And so I want to make sure I focus on that, make sure I find that subject. So in this case, a committee is a singular thing. And I should say the committee of workers wants to do something. So that's a little bit of the subject of verb agreement. I think it's just important to make sure that you, you know, can find that subject and then just pick the right verb. It's really that simple. Taking a look at some of the other stuff you had here. Garlic boy asked about more material. Yo, I've made a lot. I'll be honest. I don't have much more to push out. I've like, I went through and added a bunch of stuff the last couple weeks. So there should be more stuff for you. As for a spot with an outlet summit, there's no guarantees they can do that for you. That's not I actually read the whole test center guide because we work with a school that is a test center. And so we like wanted to help them out a little bit. There's no promise of getting an outlet. Some of them are trying to do that, but not all of them can. So like there's, if you, if you do lose your power, if you run out of battery, it will save your progress. It will stop the clock and you can charge up and then resume the test and you could even be stuck at the test center longer. But that's why they tell you to have a device that can hold a charge for about three hours because if it's less than that, there's no guarantees you're going to be able to charge up. Now you could during break also get like 10 minutes of power, but that's not very much. So just keep that in mind. There's, there's no guarantees for that. And let's see what's up. How are you doing? Thanks for saying what's up. Yeah, we're going through, if you guys got some specific things you want to work on, I can help you out today. Let me show you what's up here. All right. Yeah. Cool. So yeah, banging this stream and it's whatever you guys want, whatever you're looking for. So, so yeah, like when we're talking about these, these grammar questions, though, you really don't have to look forward. You just need to look backwards, find the blank, go in the left direction. Okay, go this way till you find the thing you need to figure out the answer. That's how grammar questions always go. Like you, you really don't need to read anything that comes after for the most part, maybe like the rest of this sentence, right? But like, if you're reading past this sentence in grammar, you're probably reading more than you need to. And I think reading what you need is one of the most important strategies. If you're reading the whole paragraph, you're going to have a bad time. So, yeah, I think the other thing on grammar that I see a lot is just pronouns, right? So making sure you choose the right pronouns to match with things. And I've gone over this in a little bit in some of my grammar exercises. Let me see if I can pull one up here that kind of touches on that point. I think my first set had a good example of that. Let me see here. Yeah. Like this one here is a good example, right? So in this case, what we've got here is a object pronoun. The object of the verb comes after the verb. So what we're going to put in here is a pronoun for people, right? And our choices are them, they, those ones and those people. Keep in mind, there's different pronouns before the verbs and after the verbs, right? We say we before a verb, but we say us after a verb. We say they before a verb, we say them after a verb. So B is totally wrong here. That's impossible to use they after the verb. You would never do that. So them could work. And then you could also make a pronoun by using those and then making it a little bit more specific. Those are options that you could use. Those ones you almost would never use to be honest because that's just kind of redundant. You wouldn't normally need this. This is kind of like one of those that's meant to just mess with your head. So ignore that. So here I just have to go backwards, right? So as soon as I see this blank, I'm going backwards. I'm trying to figure out who are we talking about and I could choose them or those people, but I need to decide if I need to say people. And so the general rule is if you have a pronoun, them, it could be any plural people or things. And so I got to go backwards and look for plural things. And I see liberties. I see qualities. And so those two things are plural. If I use them, it could be referring to one of those. And I don't want to do that here. I don't want to say we owe qualities or liberties a debt of gratitude. That doesn't make sense. Like if we keep reading here, we can see that vision and fortitude are things that people would have, right? So it makes sense that I should probably specify people in this case. I should say those people scroll down one more so you can see it. I think that's something to remember with these. Like you don't want to have redundancy, but you also don't want to have ambiguity. If you have an ambiguity, it's probably wrong. If I could interpret them to be the liberties or the qualities, it would be wrong. So in this case, it's a good idea to get specific. And I see sometimes they do these questions on the SAT with like a specific person's name. If this paragraph was talking about a specific person, but then they don't they talk about what they did or their work or their research for like three sentences. And then you might be inclined to say, Oh, well, it's a person. It's a man. I'll just put him. But it might be a while since we've mentioned that name, and it might be better to just put the name in here. So these questions are really asking you, like, do you need a pronoun? And if so, which one, right? But sometimes no pronoun is actually the right answer. So I think it's important to remember that semi colons and commas. Let's go. Let's let's jump into some of these a little bit. Because a lot of people have been asking about these. Yeah. Yeah. And it goes like those ones versus the people, like I said, this is something you will almost never use those ones is something that you would say, if you were talking about people in a group, like if I say, you know, out of a group of 20 students, those ones who it took the tests, you know, got good scores and those ones who didn't take the test didn't get any score, like I could do it that way. It's just a little awkward. I would never really use that because you could just say those who, you know, so you don't really say, you don't need to say those ones in most cases. So don't worry about that. Yeah. So random guy, you're not wrong. Like I can go back to this example and say, yeah, this is, I mean, I could use this, but if this is okay, why wouldn't this be okay? Like that's the thing. You got to be sure. I mean, obviously you would look at the context a little bit, but the point is that in the SAT, they're not going to give you those situations where you have to worry about the tense, like the time. I've noticed that most of these always are just focusing on the verb agreeing with the, the subject. So if, you know, if you look at the context and I don't know, everything else is in past tense and you've got an option that's past tense, it makes sense to be consistent, of course, but I find that most of the time when they're asking these questions, it's almost always in present tense, because they want to create these exact scenarios where you could have three other options that don't fit the subject. So I really think it's just more about looking at the verb, looking at the subject, making sure they match, and that'll usually get you through those questions. Let's, let's go talk a little bit punctuation. Let's talk about some semicolons and some commas. All right. So semicolons and commas people, let's, let's go into this a little bit. First of all, I think it's helpful to know what a dependent clause is and what an independent clause is. I don't feel like I talk about this quite enough in my videos. So let's look at dependent clauses and independent clauses first. Okay. So dependent clause is one that is dependent on another. It cannot just sit by itself. For example, if I start a sentence with when I was a child, okay, this is an, this is a dependent clause. I can't just go done. No, I can't. That's not okay. This is, this is not done. It's not finished. It feels wrong. So what we want here is a comma, right? We use commas generally before or after dependent clauses. That is a good rule to keep in mind. Now, you don't always have to use them before. A lot of times we don't use them before you could, but you don't usually have to. But after a dependent clause, we generally do. So again, I could start things, you know, with for example, right? If I had a million dollars, I still don't. Business is good and everything, but I don't have a million dollars yet, right? So I would use a comma after these dependent clauses. That's generally the rule of thumb. Like anytime we have a dependent clause, there's probably going to be a comma after it. Okay. And then that also can happen when we have like situations where I add some extra information with a dependent clause. For example, I could say has a son comma, which is great for me. We'll just, we'll just say this. I don't want to write long sentences. I want to just say stuff. My sister has a son comma, which is great for me. Dependent clause with an independent clause. This is dependent. Right. And this one here is independent. Okay. And it's independent because I could just put a period here and this sentence would be perfectly fine. That's the test. If you can put a period after that clause and then just delete everything else, then you have a dependent clause or sorry, independent clause. I'm going to mess this up a couple times. If you can't do that, then it's dependent. So here I've got independent. My sister has a son comma, which is great for me because my mom wanted a grandson and I didn't want to make one for her. And so she got one for my sister. So that's awesome. No pressure on me. So this is a good example here of these two concepts. Now I'm going to use commas generally to split those up, right? That's usually how this goes. I could even add more dependent clauses if I wanted to. I could say, for example, let's change this one up a little bit. Now let's make this interesting. Let me slide to the right. Okay. Now let's make it funny. All right. Semicolon, boom. Okay. So I can use semicolons to join independent clauses together. All right. I can add another independent clause with a semicolon. I personally hate doing this, but my bias is aside. This is correct. You are allowed to do this. Okay. So understand that like I'm using commas generally to connect those dependent clauses together with an independent clause. But if I want to add another independent clause, I'm going to use a semicolon. And then I can do that. So much. And I'll say this. I can't wait to be in the US for his birthday. Period. Okay. Now, I normally wouldn't write this this way, but this is acceptable because what I'm doing here is I got a whole other independent clause. All this is independent, right? Because this could just be a standalone sentence. I could just say, I can't wait to be in the US for his birthday. Period here, period there. Everything would be great. But if I wanted to connect that to this other part of this, maybe for reasons, then this would be okay. I could use a semicolon to connect those independent clauses. So generally that's the rule. If you're going to use a semicolon, you should be able to use a period in the same place. Use that test. If you can replace this with a period, then it's okay. All right, that's that's usually the rule with semicolon. So in this particular instance, I'm using a semicolon, I could have just used a period. They can kind of go in either way. On the SAT, remember that a lot of times the correct answer is not necessarily the best answer in the world. It's just the best out of the four choices. Sometimes you have to choose the lesser of the evils. Like there are times where I would never want to write with a semicolon personally, but it is the best option available on the SAT. And other options can be completely wrong. If I go here and I use a comma, this is what we call the comma splice. This is bad. We don't want to do this. Okay. I want a different color pen for that. So this right here is what's called the comma splice. And we don't want to do that. Okay, because that is where we can join independent clauses with commas. That creates what's called the run on sentence, which is not good. So in general, you don't want to conjoin independent clauses with commas. You want to use semicolons if you have to do that, or just period, start a new sentence. When this involves connecting words, same rules apply, right? If you're making a, if you're using a transition word for an independent clause, then you could use a semicolon. If you're using a transition word for a dependent clause, you could just use a comma. And sometimes you might not need any punctuation at all. We talk a little bit about those transition words, like I could say, if I wanted to add, let's say, some transition words into this mess, right? So, let's just keep it simple. I love driving. I do, you know, in the United States, right? I'm going to leave this place blank for a second. I realize I got to move my screen thingy for a second here. I'm going to run another thing. Yeah, this, this is kind of, I spaced this out a little awkward, but it'll work. All right, I love driving. I'm going to run another Mustang. So I could use a connector in here, like, you know, therefore, right? And in this case, we've got two independent clauses, right? We've got, I love driving. That's, that's independent. And I'm going to rent another Mustang. That's independent. And so I'm conjoining those with this. So because these are two independent clauses, I only have two choices of punctuation here. I can either use a period or I could use a semicolon. That's the rule. Now, therefore is sitting there all by itself. And usually we will use a comma after these types of transition words. So what you typically will see the correct answers on the SAT are going to usually be a semicolon or period before the transition word and then a comma after it. That's usually how these go. So again, just remember the rule though, it doesn't even matter. Like this word doesn't really matter. What matters is the sentences around it. So I see that these are two independent clauses. So I know I only have two options here. And keep in mind on the SAT, they're not going to give you two equally valid options. So you won't see a period and a semicolon option unless they mess with this, like they could mess this up. But the point is you're not going to, you're not going to have to choose between two good choices. You're only going to have one of those two. And usually I find it's the semicolon. They want to see if you know where to use that. So then I'll just use my comma after. Now, if I were to use a different transition word here, it would change the game, right? Like if I used maybe let's say, let's say I'll use a simpler one, right? So just say so, right? In this kind of case, you know, with these like simpler ones, it's probably best to just use the full stuff before I could again use a semicolon. Again, this doesn't really matter that much. I'm going to just apply the same basic rules, because I'm working with these two different sentences that are independent. So just keep that in mind. Like, you don't normally see people do this, but it is acceptable. You could do it. So let me let me take a peek at some of the questions up in here can be an independent clause after a colon. I wouldn't normally do that. Thanks for the question, Luke. It's I mean, you can. It's just not that common. Normally, what you do after a colon is a dependent clause or even like a fragment, like just a short phrase, you know, but you could use an independent clause. Colons don't have a ton of rules. They're pretty awesome. They're one of my favorite punctuation marks. But the real reason is, are you using it for the right reasons? Because a colon is mostly for you to like to explain something to illustrate or to define something that you left undetermined in your previous clause. So that's usually when you use it, when you need like an immediate clarification of something. That's why you do it. So it wouldn't make sense to start like to have a really long rambling sentence or a really long clause after a colon. That's not usually common. It could be done, but it would have to be done really well. I'm gonna slam some more coffee. All right. Word problems on math. That's where I'm not going to be very helpful, Val. Sorry, I hate to break it to you. I'm not great with math, but everyone, like if you have some examples and you want to send me something or something, like I could take a look at it for you and maybe help you figure it out. I can often parse the questions, but I don't know what to do next because I suck at math. Okay. With vocab, a lot of people ask about vocab here. And then we'll have to talk about some vocab. And okay, tips for reading long text is I get really distracted. Don't read the whole thing. Stop reading the whole thing. There are no long tests on the SAT anymore. It's all short paragraphs. Just read what you need. If your brain has some ADD, which mine does, I understand. You just have to read smarter, okay? Don't read the whole thing. If you're reading all this, you're gonna get bored. So again, here I just see what kind of question I have and I go, okay, I literally just need to read this. Species blank to their environment. Species, adapt, A, done. Don't read all this stuff. And even on the types of questions where they encourage you to read a lot because of the type of question, like a supporting claims question, I mean, I can open one of those up and show you real quick just what to read. If you can just read efficiently, you're gonna be fine, right? Yeah, like this right here. It's asking me about William James theories. I just got to look for William James. Okay, there's his name. Where's theories? I would look for words like believe, argues, thinks, whatever. So I'm going to look at the start of the sentences because that's usually where the verbs are going to be. Okay, he wrote on topics. That's cool. He was an advocate of this fundamentalism advocate would be a theory kind of thing. Okay, mental processes help individual individuals adapt their environment. And then, okay, he believed that individuals will adapt their behavior to their surroundings. Okay, that's really, that's really all I need to know. Okay, that's all I need. Like the rest of the stuff is extra detail. It's filler. It's unnecessary. Like, don't waste your time reading stuff you don't need. Okay, I'm looking right here at this and I see that these are the two lines that really tell me like what his beliefs were, what his theories are. So now, I can go ahead and focus on these things. And yeah, like, there's context clues, there's things about children in here and single parent families and whatever. I often would encourage you to also read the last sentence a lot of times or a little bit of the first because it's effective to know what we're talking about. But even here, I don't really need to know much about this. I just wanted to make sure I saw his name in here. Last part kind of tells me maybe some more context that's important. But this is it. I don't need to read from start to finish. I want to read smart. I want to read precisely. I want to be like a surgeon with my knife just cutting up the text and getting the pieces that I need. And when you read actively like that, I can tell you now it's you stay focused more, you stay locked in because you're reading with purpose, you're reading with intention. You're not just trying to like slap yourself in the face with a paragraph and hope that the right information sticks. You are an assassin going into that paragraph and getting what you need. Okay, it's like Mission Impossible, Tom Cruise coming down the rope trying to get the object for the movie. Like that's how you got to be. Okay, so that's where it's at. All right, a lot of people asking about vocabulary in here. And then so, let me see what else we got in here. Okay, yeah, we talked about the colons. Again, a lot of people begging for vocabulary. We'll get into that then for sure. Okay. Yeah. Again, like I said, there is no difference between comma and semicolon or sorry, semicolon and period. There is no difference. It's literally the same thing. It's just a style choice when they're equally considered on the test. So as long as you have two independent clauses, you can use either one. Yeah, use the annotation feature in blue book. You mentioned I for the record, I wouldn't recommend doing that much on the actual test. I think that takes way too much time. Here's the thing. I don't want to throw shade on any other specific channels, but I feel like there's a lot of people that give advice as if they've never taken the test for real or they give advice from the perspective of a really experienced adult. I try to give advice based on the experiences of my students. I know that I'm going to be better at this than most of you. That's the point. That's why I'm the teacher, but that's like, I can't just tell you to do things exactly like assuming you understand them the way I do. Sorry, dying. So what I mean by that is like, I could use the annotation feature and still have time left over because I can answer questions really quickly because I have been an English teacher for a decade and I have years of experience with the SAT. I don't think you can do that, to be honest. And I'm not trying to be negative. I'm just saying like, why do something that's going to take you longer? It's going to take you time to highlight, mark, type your observations. These are small texts. Like I could understand the annotation feature making sense on the old SAT. And on the old SAT, I told people highlight stuff, underline stuff, circle things and write notes. I did that on the old SAT. It made total sense on the paper version to do that because you had these long texts and you can't possibly remember everything. But with this, this is a paragraph. This is it. That's all it is. You can understand that. You should be able to go in there, get the information you need and answer your questions. You should not have to be making like complex markups and concept maps for a single paragraph. You really shouldn't. And if you are doing that, I guarantee you're spending so much time on that question that you're cutting time that you could use somewhere else. If you're spending more than two minutes on a question, you should move on. You should have moved on already. But if you're spending two minutes on a question, that's a sign that that question is too hard for you. And odds are you're going to get it wrong. If you can't figure out the answer in two minutes, you probably are going to get it wrong, even if you keep sitting there and working on it. So you might as well just move on. And so for me, that's why I always tell people, try to aim for one minute per question. You get one minute, 10 seconds. But if you could do one minute per question, you're going to be golden. You're going to have extra time to review and you're great. And there's a lot of questions that you can answer faster than that. But I'm not a fan of the annotation tool. I feel like it's, it's a waste of time. Honestly, I have not, the only times I've ever thought of using it, even thought of it, were like on data questions where they have like big tables and maybe like I get a little confused. But I would say that's like one question per test, maybe. And I'm not going to put that much time into a single question. Cause I got other things to do. I got 26 other questions to do on this module. So, so that's my advice on that. I don't, I don't think you should really spend a lot of time with that annotation tool. I mean, look, experiment for yourself. Okay. That's one other thing I want to say to everybody here, big cam for a second. Experiment for yourself. There is no one right way to do anything on the SAT. Okay. There is the best way for you. Now I think that a lot of my methods work really well for a lot of people, but they might not work always for everyone. So do your own experimentation, like play around. I tell people, for example, to use a mouse. Okay. And I've had people tell me, oh, I'm trying to use a mouse and it's not helping me. Well, then don't do it. Like if it's not helping you, that's okay. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you. Maybe it just means you have a custom that's different. So do things your way. I recommend trying things because in my experience they've helped me and I will share that with people. And I've seen that it has helped a lot of my students. So I will share that with people, but you can still try your own thing. Okay. Do what works for you. All right. So let's see here. Yeah. The vocab, again, a lot of people begging for the vocab. By the way, Zaheef, will this be recorded? You're watching it live on YouTube. It stays there forever. Yeah. Okay. Where we don't know any of the words. Yeah, vocab is tricky. Let's see if we don't know the meaning of the option. Now, here's the thing. You can still work that out. Let's see if we can find some hard vocab questions here. All right. Yeah. Okay. I'm just going through all these questions. There's a lot of stuff to process in between my rants. Yeah. If a paragraph mostly shows up with negative words and ideas, but the answer is positive about the paragraph, how do we catch it? I mean, generally speaking, you're going to want to match the tone of the paragraph. So I feel like the only way that you would do that if you have to change the tone, you should have the appropriate transition. You should have a transition like although or despite something that kind of acknowledges that there's going to be a change in the tone. Should you hide the time countdown? No, I don't be afraid of the time countdown. Keep it up. Why? It's going to show up anyway when you're down to five minutes. It shows up and turns red and looks scary. Like why hide from it? I like to keep it up so I can check how I'm doing. And if I can see that I'm running behind, maybe I need to start skipping some questions or marking some things for review or just move a little faster. Like you want to look a race car driver wants to know their time. I think every professional athlete knows what time it is when they have to take that last second shot to win the game. Like that's what professionals do. They keep tabs on the time. They don't let it scare them. They rise up to the occasion. Okay, so that's what you ought to do in my opinion. All right, so how to concentrate? That's tough. I mean paraphrasing things in your head. That's what you should do. If you're having trouble getting through that and getting that done, it's tough. I'll be honest. I think that concentration is a skill that everybody has to develop. Put away TikTok for a while, maybe. I'm going to sound a little boomer by saying that, but maybe just leave TikTok alone before your SAT. Try to get some of that attention span back. And I don't know. I think mental state is important. I think concentration is a tricky thing. It is not something that is easily trained. It's the kind of thing you build over time. And I think that your mental state is important too. Obviously, if you're tired, if you're stressed, like if the environment's uncomfortable, if it's really hot in your test room, that's going to mess with your concentration. Like concentration is a very weird thing. It's very nebulous. It doesn't just do what you want it to do. It's very dependent on the environment. So one thing I tell everybody here, make sure you get a good night's sleep. If it's really late where you are, like that's why I did this at this time of day so you can go to sleep and get some good rest. Have some breakfast. I personally, like if you like caffeine in the morning, I recommend it. If it makes you nervous, don't drink it. Just say and do what's good for you. But get yourself in a good mental state. You want to wake up, get that shower, wake up, like have your breakfast, get some energy going, get pumped up a little bit, move the body, you know, get the blood flowing. Like you want to feel good when you go to the test. That's going to boost that ability to concentrate for longer. If you come in because you crammed all night with two hours of sleep and you're like feeling crap, you're not going to have a good time. So don't do that. All right, make sure you get a good night's rest. Make sure you got good energy because good energy, good vibes leads to better concentration, better understanding. Like when you're in the zone, you perform better and to get into the zone, you got to prepare your body and your mind and do things that your body needs for it to function well. Okay. So I think it's important to think about like how much sleep you get, what you're eating in the morning, literally like it. Again, I treat this almost like athletes treat their work, you know, right on scrap paper for English. Nah, why? I don't know. I don't know. If you want, try it, but I don't see the point. Okay. All right. Let's talk about, it's okay to take a practice test today. Yeah, for sure. Take a practice test today. Do it. No big deal. Like, all right, let's talk a little bit about, you know, I see you Nikun about the transition words like with commas and semicolons. Again, it really just, like I showed, it's all about the clauses. If you have independent clauses that you're putting together, then you're going to want to use a semicolon before those transition words. It's that simple. Like if we've got two independent clauses, we need that. Now, if we've got dependent clauses, we're probably just going to connect with commas. But that's the general rule, like for most of these cases. I'll do a little bit more about like some of the transition word punctuations after we talk a little bit about some vocabulary questions. Let me crack open like some beefier vocab stuff. I might even have some like previously unreleased vocab stuff I can show you here, because I have worked on a lot of different things that some of them were not quite up to my usual standards because they were tough. Okay. So, all right. All right. Here's a good example. I think of some tricky vocab. Let me zoom this out a little bit so we can fit this in here. Yeah, there we go. All right. Let's take a look. Now, again, vocabulary questions. I can always, I remember that our general strategy, everyone, is to read the question first. We're always going to look at the question so we know what we're dealing with and then we can apply the right strategy. It's just like playing a video game. I see the enemy. I pull out the correct weapon so that I can kill it. You know, I study my opponent. All right. So I can apply the right strategy. I'm not going to come into the fight with the wrong tools. So I see here, which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase. As soon as I see that, I know I'm dealing with vocabulary. And what I want to do is go focus mostly on this. Why is it asking me to link to stuff? That's weird. I don't know. Yeah. See, this PDF is scuffed. Anyway, I'm going to focus on this. Okay. I want to focus on the blank and pretty much what comes before it. This is almost all I really need to read here to pick the right word. Okay. So this is obviously a paragraph about dragons. It says they're seen as a symbol of courage and justice and their blank reputation for defending the helpless. Okay. So obviously courage, justice, defending the helpless. All of these are good things. So I'm probably going to want to pick a word that sounds good. Okay. But let's take a look at our options. Oh, crap. I don't know what some of these words mean. Truthfully, I don't. I could not define Dottie for you, for example. But let's just look at the options and see what we can figure out. Now sluggish. I know that that usually means like lazy. I don't think that's going to apply here because we're looking for something positive. Shoddy usually means it's been like done poorly. Like it's not good. Cowardly, obviously doesn't fit here. That leaves me with Dottie. That's got to be the right answer. I don't know what that word means, but it's got to be the right answer. Now, even, all right, let's, let's pretend I have an even worse vocabulary. I don't know what sluggish is, but I know what a slug is. Maybe I can picture slug. Like it's like disgusting and gross. I've played Elden Ring. I know what a slug looks like. They breathe fire on you sometimes or sped acid at you. Like, okay. Yeah, sluggish would be bad, I guess. You know, shoddy. Okay. Maybe I don't know what that word is. That sounds tough, but like, you know, shot, it sounds kind of like a bad word that would get me demonetized. Maybe it's not so good. Like, try to take an educated guess, break it down into parts and sort of evaluate that, right? That could be one way to approach it. Like trying to just narrow it down to a 50-50, even if at the end of the day I can say, okay, I know what a slug is, so I don't think sluggish is good. I know cowardly, so that's not right. I'm between B and C. Okay, then just guess. If you can't, at this point, again, we do not want to waste time on this test. Staring at these two options that you don't know is not going to help. There will not be any divine revelations that come from above to, to give you the answer. You're not going to suddenly have a spark of genius that like, and visualize words flying from the dictionary into your eyeballs. That's not going to happen. So just pick, pick and move on and, and accept the fact that sometimes you're going to have these situations. And that's why most people don't get perfect scores. And that's why most universities also don't care that much because they know that this is not a realistic test of your actual English abilities. Like it's okay. Sometimes that's going to happen. I'm lucky. I know shoddy because I watched the shoddy cast on YouTube. I know what that word is because I love that guy, but I don't know what Dottie is. I really genuinely don't. I'm not even making that up as an English teacher. I could try to define it, but I probably would be off. And the point is I can eliminate the other options. So review what we want to do. Look at the question. Read just what we need. I'm just reading the area around the blank because the rest doesn't matter. And then I got to go to my options and eliminate anything I don't like. I could, I could easily eliminate D kind of figured out a maybe I'm stuck between B and C. Take a guess and move on and keep moving because if you're wasting time on these questions, which should be some of the fastest ones because vocab is like, it's like this. Okay. If you know it, you know it, you mark it, you go. If you don't know it, you don't know it, you mark it and go like, don't be, if you're spending 20, 30 seconds on your vocab questions, you're probably thinking too much to be honest. You're probably thinking too much. You got to just go because you're going to need that time elsewhere. You're going to want that time for other questions. And I think that's the important thing to understand here. Dottie means brave. Yeah. I mean, reputation for defending the helpless and fighting for what is right. Sure. It doesn't even matter if it fits in the context much here, Bang. Like the bottom line is I can rule out the other three. It may not be the best word in the world, but it's the best given the four that I got. And they are really scary in Elden Ring. That's facts. All right. So let's see here. Let's take a look at, okay. One word can have many meetings. Yeah. That's also true too. Okay. Like let's take a look at some other ones from here. Again, I drafted this PDF. I have my boy Tyler Makin's PDFs and this one was like meant to be super duper hard. So I ended up not using it for my classes that I didn't really go through and like fix some of the errors that it had, but hey, we're using it today. So there you go. Okay. All right. So word of phrase, one must also blank comma or share the Christian faith with others in order to bring them closer to God. Okay. So in this sentence, what I see here is that we're talking about something that Christians are supposed to do or share the Christian faith. And because that or share the Christian faith is in commas, I know that what they're doing here is like giving me a definition of this word in the blank. They're actually helping me here. They're telling me like what I'm supposed to put in here because or share the Christian faith is an alternative explanation. So I just need to pick a word that works for that. And okay, there are a few different things that I can look at here to help me pick the right answer. First of all, promulgate is like, that's a word that requires an object. You must promulgate something. Okay. So I know that's not correct because I couldn't just end my clause with that word. Propagandize. That's usually appropriate for political settings. Propaganda. I know that. And so that doesn't really make sense with a religious context. Patronize is actually negative. That's when you sort of talk to somebody as if they're an idiot. So that would not apply here. Could but doesn't, which leaves me with deep proselytize. And if you know the word, you know that proselytize is a person that like preaches about a religion. A proselytize is a person that tries to go out and convert someone. So proselytize. Okay. But again, even if I didn't know what that word means, I happen to have a very religious upbringing. I know a lot about these terms, but I could rule out the other ones in other ways. I know that A doesn't work grammatically. I know that B works in a totally different context. I know that C is just straight up wrong. So by looking at those clues, looking at, you know, first of all, my, the grammar factor, does it work grammatically in the sentence? Does it work within the context that we're discussing? Does it actually make sense? You know, applying those tests, I could get myself down to D in this case. Okay. So yeah, I can throw this in the folder for you guys if you want. So B got your thinking. Yeah, like it, B feels like it could work here because, but again, propaganda works with like political stuff. To propagandize something is to take an event and turn it into propaganda for political purposes and propaganda is always political. So I know that and, and knowing that I can eliminate that word because I understand that we're talking about Christian faiths in this particular example. Let's, let's try another one here. Okay. Mosadjul, blah, blah, blah. With endless possibilities for entertainment adventures. No wonder why this bustling metropolis is blank as one of the most popular cities in the world. Okay. Okay. So this is going to be like passive voice using a verb. Vaunted actually is good. Vaunted I know means like, like something is really like respected, something that's kind of like praised a lot. That could work. Prized doesn't quite work. Usually, like you wouldn't prize something as one of the most popular cities. Like prize would be kind of like, how do I put it? Like you would, you would do that with a, with a thing and you would just say it's, it's prize. Like you wouldn't really explain it as one of the most popular cities. This is more like an opinion, right? This is more like an opinion. So I want to choose a word that connects to opinions. I know Vaunted does work for that. Defined is pretty formal here. And again, I don't think that really fits like in this case is one of the most popular cities. Like that's, that's again, an opinion definition doesn't really imply opinion. Criticized doesn't fit. This is a very positive paragraph. That's a very negative word. So again, I can argue that like, I know B doesn't quite fit the context. C doesn't really make sense because it's an opinion, not a death, like something that's defined, like who, who defined it? Who's, who's the official popular city list maker, right? What organization does that? You know, doesn't make sense. Criticized doesn't fit here. So I can leave it with Vaunted. So even if I don't know what that word means, I can definitely use the other three to get rid of those. And that's the approach you need to take on these questions. So if you don't know the word, don't be afraid to market, just do your best to eliminate the other choices. If you get down to a 50, 50, you only have two choices. Okay, you got to take a guess. The sooner you accept that and just take that guess and move on the better because that's more time you can use to review other things. And that's more time that you have to deal with harder questions, ones that do require you to read more. Okay, so I think, I think that's one of the biggest mistakes I see people make on this test is like they, they sit there and stare when they don't know the answer or they, they freeze and you can't freeze. You have to keep moving. Okay. And, and, hey, maybe you're going to get some questions wrong. Everybody does. Okay. I know, I know you can't fully see the whole passage here. Sorry, I'm trying to like balance it out a little bit and keep myself out of the way. Maybe, maybe I'll just switch to the other, other view where I don't have the thing. But the point is there's, there's not much I need to read here, just this last part, right? So, yeah. All right. So we've covered this, let's see, these hard type words. Now, and for the record, bang, these are harder than what the SAT does. I actually kind of gave Tyler some bad instructions for a couple of these. I was like, dude, go get words from the GRE. Like, I was in, I don't know, I was in a mood. I was like, let's give them some hard stuff. And, and GRE level is really higher. It's for like master's degrees and stuff. So I kind of, we kind of went overboard with some of these. And that's why I have these like really hard ones that I have not used in my classes, because it's like, no, this is too much. This is, this is too difficult. Like this right here. Okay. The government has been blank in many of these issues. I think this is a typo. Again, see, I have not cleaned up this PDF. You can see the government has been blank in many of these issues, particularly when it comes to economic disparities between the wealthy and poor. Now in this particular case, I don't quite have enough information yet. These issues, I'm not 100% sure what we're talking about. So I see, I want to go back a little bit to understand what these issues are. And so I look at the previous sentence and it says corruption, inequality, violence are still prevalent. Okay. So I understand that what they're trying to say here is like, maybe the government has actually been part of the problem, right? Corruption is connected to the government. So now that I've read that little extra bit of information, again, reading what we need, when I read this sentence, I see these issues. I don't know what those are, but I know that the word these is going to refer to something previous. And so all I got to do is go read the sentence before that. And now I got all the info I need to answer this question. So this is all I have to read. Okay. That's all I need. So let's look at these words. Like I have acquiescent. I know to acquiesce means to like give up to let someone else take control. I don't think that makes more sense here. Blithe means like you don't care. So that doesn't really, I mean that could be blithe, but I think that they're implying that they're involved because of the corruption statement. Complicit. That actually means that they are involved. That would probably be my best answer. Complacent means that they're just chilling. They're not, they don't really seem to care, but that's kind of the same as blithe. So I'm going to go with C. It is C. So that would be your best answer. Like, again, just, I think the key thing here is to use those reading strategies. I am just reading what I need. This is all I read. Like, I do not care about Mexico being beautiful. I don't care about Mexicans feeling powerless. Sorry, guys. Like no offense to you. I love Mexicans. Have Mexican friends, you know, or de la way, but like this is all I need to read. I just need these two sentences so that I know the context and because I went back and read that extra sentence, I understand the corruption, which is obviously implying that the government is involved means that this sentence wants to say that the government is part of the problem and only one word implies that the government is actually causing some of these issues. And there we go. Okay. So, so that's how we do. Yeah, I'm sorry about the noise in the background. My NVIDIA does its best, but there has been construction going on next door for the last four or five months. I have to record all my videos on Sundays mostly so that there's not a lot of background noise. And I usually have been streaming in the afternoon when they're done working. Um, they've been getting quieter, but like dude today, like today, just now, like that some of the loudest drilling noises that I've heard in months. And of course they're like, yeah, he's streaming right now Friday morning. Let's go. Let's do it as hard as possible. Yeah. I'm sorry about that. I'm not great with like math stuff. Um, I did actually see a question the other day. Let me, let me just, let me let me just take a moment and see if I can find this because I was on Reddit's SAT section the other day and, and somebody posted a math word problem and I actually could answer it completely fine because I understood the words and I was like, how do you be not understanding this one because like I can do it and I suck at math. Um, let me see, let me see if I can scroll back and find this and show it to you. Um, hang on. That was, that was a different one. I don't know that I, yeah, yeah, yeah, hear it. Oh, they deleted it. They deleted it. They must have felt stupid or something. That's sad because they deleted the post. I would have been able to give you at least one example of me doing one thing correct on math. I'm sorry though. Um, yeah. So it's all good if you're new though. I'm not much of a math guy. We do have a bunch of math recordings that my other teachers have handled. So if you want to check those out in our folder, you can do that. Um, I have also contemplated doing a series where I try to get good at math and get to the point where I can do 800. I'm not sure I have the time to follow through on that to be honest because I got a lot of work here, but I would like to try something like that. Um, predictions for tomorrow's exam, please don't waste your time watching those guys. It's pointless. There are no predictions. There's nothing, all you can say is what we already know, which is what the tests have shown us. There's going to be about 30, 40% of vocabulary questions with transition words being about half of those. There's going to be about, you know, 10 to 12 grammar questions and 10 to 12 punctuation questions. Like these are just things we know from practice tests. There's nothing to predict anymore on these tests. Like everybody's going to, the person sitting next to you is going to have a different test. So what's the point in predicting? There's, there's no point. Like don't, don't worry about that. Just focus on what you can control. I feel like people get really excited about like, Oh, what's going to be on the test? Like nobody knows. And, and anybody like publishing those videos is just like making stuff up. Like I don't understand it. Like I've never been like, well, what's going to be on the test because I don't know. I don't work at college board. I don't have any inside information. And if I did share it with you, I would get sued. So like who cares? I'm telling you, don't worry about it. Yeah, but you're going to be all right. But you got this. Okay. Stay positive. My predictions is that you guys are going to have good scores. That's what I predict. Okay. I predict positive things for everybody here. That's, that's the only prediction that I have that matters. I predict that you guys, because you've been working hard and showing up and like watching classes and using the practice material, you're going to have better scores this time around. And that's, that's a prediction that I can say with confidence. Okay. That's a prediction that I believe it. All right. So, so let's believe. When do you think Blue Book will release more practice tests? I think, I think Blue Book probably won't for a while. I think that other companies will soon. I think like Pearson, you know, Barron's Kaplan, like all those Princeton review, like all those companies that always published SAT material, you know that they're working on it right now. They got to be, they're working on their own computer program or they're working on their own like paper tests or something. Because next year, the Americans have to take this test. And so with Americans taking the digital SAT, they're going to need that material. And that's why they did it this way. They've made all of us, the test subjects, the giddy pigs for the whole year. And then that gives the company's time to produce material that they can sell for hundreds of dollars. And then you'll buy that because you need more practice tests. That's what's going to happen. Like College Board has never given us a lot of free practice tests. I think they've always had just a couple or like, I remember before them having like two, three or four tests, like that's all they've ever given us. So I don't expect them to suddenly start giving us more official practice tests. I think they're going to leave it as it is and then let their friends come out and sell you material, which a lot of us are just going to pirate on the internet. Let's be real. We're going to go to Russian websites and steal stuff. But yeah, like I would not expect more practice tests or official tests to come out of College Board anytime soon. I think that probably by like September or October, we're going to get more material from other companies. And that is useful. Like I appreciate those materials. I used to use them for my paper SAT classes, you know? So that's what it is. Yeah, I'm glad you appreciate the no BS dude. I have a low tolerance for BS, Lucas. Like I really do. And I just like to give it to you straight. And does that mean I'm less click baity? Yeah, sure. But whatever, I don't care. Okay, recap and punctuations. Everybody's asking about that. I think we could go through a couple of different punctuation types. Can you super score like 10 SATs? Technically, yes. I mean, I wouldn't recommend that though, because that's kind of a bad look. Like if if if you're taking the test 10 times, like they would be like, All right, dude, you need to chill out. Like you're worrying about the SAT way too much. I mean, at a certain point, if you take the test so many times, and you're not showing consistent improvement, or you're just taking it to get higher scores when you already have a good score, like you're not showing awareness. And that kind of looks bad to universities, like you seem a little like weird or naive. And what they're looking for is maturity. And so they would expect you to understand that like, Hey, I got a good enough score. I'm okay, let me focus on the other parts of my application because they're more important because they are. So those are things that I think about that. Grading system. What do we got here? I don't know what to say about grading system. I've done my analysis of it. I can tell that there are different values for different questions on different modules. It's still unclear to me if it's like running a two-curve system. I have my research assistant running a bunch of tests, by the way, we're working on that data. Okay, to extend it in text one versus text two. Okay, let's do a little bit of pair of passages. I appreciate your persistence and patience. Other people have asked about that too. We can get into that. Let's see. Okay. Yeah, maximum number of points that can get deducted, I have seen 30. So far, my tests have confirmed 30 points is what you can lose, which is a lot on one mistake to be fair. That hurts. Okay. All right. Let's crack open a little bit of paired passages. I think that would be good for you. Let me take a look at my stuff. Let me see what I want to pull out here. I already did the video with set one. I published a video a few days ago about this. If you check that out, I'll work on a different PDF so that you can maybe get some different perspectives on this for a second. Yeah, poetry sucks, man. I feel you. What's up? How much time do I plan to stream? Good question. I got about 45 more minutes. I have a meeting with a mom at 11 and it's 10 right now. So I got to get off a little bit before 11. So we got about another hour. Okay. So, yeah. All right, let's take a peek here. Yeah, let's go ahead and hop into some paired passages for just a second. I'll show you a couple. Again, don't worry about these too much because there's only a couple that you have to deal with on the whole test. This is not that common anymore, which is nice. Least points you can lose. I've heard people saying that they only lost 10 points on hard math questions on math modules. I have not seen that happen in English. I've seen 20 points lost. It's unclear to me exactly how many, but I've heard of people getting 10 points off for missing hard questions. So I think 10 is the minimum, 30 is the maximum. It's hard to say, though. So, okay, and I've seen your point about punctuating complex series. We can go into that as well. That does touch on some semicolon stuff. Thank you. All right. So, right here, if I get something that's like, what would they agree on? I just need to know what their perspectives are. I'm going to try to get the main idea of each really quick. Okay. So, first one here. I like to read the first sentence and the last sentence, right? Okay. Oath of Office to serve as the first president of the United States. This is George Washington. We can achieve a better future for our nation. Let's work together. Okay. So, president wants a better future for the nation. Great. What about this person? Okay. Hard work and perseverance. All right. He's talking about hard work and perseverance. I challenge each and every one of you to rise to the occasion and make something of yourselves. Okay. So, I see two people trying to kind of inspire. One person is sort of suggesting that like he needs to work with the people. One person is sort of putting it more on the people, like saying, hey, you know, hard work and perseverance, like it's a little bit more your responsibility to make something of yourself, whereas this guy is saying, let's work together to make something for everybody. So, understanding those differences, right? I'm just going to look for something where they might overlap. I would expect these guys to overlap and I'm not looking even at the answers. I haven't opened up this exercise in forever. So, let me just share my mental process with you. I would expect that they would agree that like hard work and determination are important because one guy asked them to work together. One guy told them to work for themselves. So, work is a common theme, okay? I also would expect that like both of them feel that there's a sense of responsibility that individuals have some some responsibility to make society better. Those are things that I expect and and what I'm doing here is predictive reading. I'm trying to read what I need and I notice I just use first line, last line, first line, last line. I do a little bit of paraphrasing and then I try to predict. I try to think what could be a good answer and then if I see that answer, it's going to be a lot easier. So, let's take a look at what we got. I see they would both agree that it's making mistakes as detrimental. No, I don't think there's enough. No, just no. The two others would likely agree that hard work and perseverance are essential to success. I feel like that's probably the right answer. Like I said, hard work is one of those things that overlaps between these two texts. So, I'm probably going to mark B at this point and move on. For the sake of illustration, I will look at the other answers with you and show you what else I think. They would both agree that finding good fortune with others is the key to success. I don't think that's the key. Again, this guy talked about hard work and perseverance and challenging each other, stress the need to depend on others. I think make something of yourself doesn't support that. So, at this point, I'm pretty confident I would say B, let's go. That's how I approach these paired passages. I'm just going to read what I need and then take a look at my answers, but I'm working on my own answer. I'm working on my own idea and when I see that that idea matches one of the answers, I'm probably going to mark it. So, you can do that too. You can kind of process the text and this method works for a lot of other kinds of questions. Like, when I get supporting claims, I understand the claim and then I think what would I want to see? If I was this researcher, what data would I want? And then I often find an answer that's very similar and then that makes me feel more confident about choosing that answer. That's a good strap, you know? Let's see. Yeah. So, let me show you how. All right. Just take a look at your guys' questions if you have anything. Again, time management, keep the clock up and keep it to one minute, 10 seconds. I mean, one minute ideally per question is a good rule. If you do that, you'll be fine. Again, if you, something that might be good to do is while you work, set a timer for one minute and every time it beeps, every time it goes off, I just want you to skip to the next question. Like, I want you to drill in your brain what a minute feels like. You need an internal clock too that kind of tells you, okay, I'm taking too long. I need to move on. I need to make a guess. I need to mark this for review and move on. Like, that internal clock is valuable. I personally have developed that over a long time because I've done a lot of public speaking and in public speaking, you often have a time limit and you have to adhere to that time limit and I used to do a lot of model United Nations where you had to do one minute speeches. So, like, I used to practice just talking for a full minute. I would set the timer on my phone and every time it beeped, I would just stop talking, reset the timer and start over and I did that over and over and over and over in front of the mirror. I'm talking like, do that 10 times in a row. 10 minutes. 10 minutes practice, but that's all it takes. You do that for a few days. You will develop an internal clock and you will know what a minute feels like and when you start doing that thing, when I started, like, when I started speaking in public for actual MUN events and other things, like, I could tell you what my time was. I would walk off the stage and, like, look at my advisor and be like, that was a minute and two seconds. They gave me two extra seconds and he's like, yeah, you're right. Like, I could feel that minute. I knew when it was time to start making a conclusion to my speech because I knew that I was getting close to that minute and if you do the same thing for yourself, if you just sort of condition yourself with a timer to just do things for a minute, it's going to get easier for you to develop that sense and it'll be harder for you to get stuck. You're not going to sit there, like, I don't know what to do. I'm frozen. Like, that won't happen to you because you're going to have that internal clock telling you, yo, keep moving. Okay. First sentence and last sentence is mostly enough for almost everything bang, like straight up, I would say that. Bruce, there is no more separate writing or reading anymore in the digital SAT. So don't try to jump around and find the writing questions because they're going to, like the questions that would have been from the writing part are like the grammar punctuation questions for the most part and they're going to be dispersed throughout the test. Most of the times they're kind of in the middle in a row, but they could be dispersed throughout the test. Like you don't want to be jumping around looking for certain kinds of questions and there's no more distinct writing or reading section. So don't try to find your favorite questions. I think I would not recommend that. You're going to spend time on things that you don't want to do. People have asked a lot about this, about whether the practice tests and the actual tests seem to fit in my experience with my students. It's been all over the place. Like, I've seen, I've seen a lot of people getting less on the official test than what they thought they would get from practice tests. It seems to me that some of the hard modules are harder on the real thing than people anticipate. And I feel like that's why I'm seeing the trend I do. I see people that get like 1440 in practice getting 1350 on the test. People that get 1500 in practice getting, you know, 1400 on the test. Like I see the high scores dropping and I see a lot of the low scores going up. So it makes me think that maybe those easy modules are actually helping out some people because I had some people in my March group, like straight up not going to lie, the people that were in the class like January, February heads of people in there that were not doing very well. They were not, you know, participating a lot class. They weren't seeing a lot of improvement. And they like still got final scores in some cases that were higher than we anticipated. They were getting more than what they got on their practice. There were like two exceptions to that. But I feel like so I feel like if you're still in your early stages, if you're in the beginnings of your preparation, then you might see a boost. You might be surprised at your result. If you are in that advanced stage, you're getting really high scores really frequently. You might drop harder than you think, you know, it could happen. But it's hard to say whether that's because the test is harder or whether that's just your nerves or whether it's just luck. Like I don't quite have enough data to make a strong statement. So you don't know what question types are called. I mean, to be fair, I have my own nomenclature for these things that don't feel bad if you don't know the exact terms. Like, yeah, if you're scoring 1430, that's great. I don't know. I know it's going to be your first test too. So like first test, anything can happen. Yeah. All right, let's take a look here at one more of these pair passages so we can go ahead and hear. So okay, this one actually, no, I don't like that one for this. All right, this is a good one. Which detail in passage two with the author of passage one most likely identify with. Okay, so in this case, I want to look first at this guy. I always want to think about what I want to read first. I want to read author of passage one first because I want to know about this person. If I want to know what they identify with, I need to know about this person. I need to know general things about this person and I need something specific in this one. So I want to go general first, big picture to small. So author of paragraph one, what would he most likely identify with? I need to know something about this one. He feels lost and alone in the world. No one truly understands me surrounded by people, but I'm in my own little bubble of loneliness. Okay, this person's just depressed and feels alone. Great. All right, let's look here at a detail that might match with that. All right, sky was a blanket of gray and the air was heavy with rain. That sounds like that could be it. That seems like that's, geez, that's a good option. Dismal landscape hint of cheerfulness. No, see that contradicts gloom. Man, this is loud over here. Man, this sucks. Gloom was, all right. Everything else seems like it transitions from bad to good. I think this is the only detail that would work. So the gray sky probably is the right answer. Like I'll go with gray sky. That seems like something that would fit this person's sadness. This person's probably British. Yes, let's go. See, again, just organizing my strategy. I said, I'm going to read this first because I want to know about this author because I need to know what his problems are. Okay, I need to know this. And then I got to here and I was good. I'm like, I don't need to read anymore. Start reading here. Immediately see a detail that feels like it would be good for this. I kept kind of peeking through the rest of this paragraph and I see that like, here's the thing. I'm using little words to help me. Instead of reading the whole thing, I see yet and despite like, I can see that they're saying good things with bad things because they're using these. So I'm probably not going to use those details, which is why I stopped reading. I didn't even read this last part. I saw these words and I knew I don't have to keep reading. This is stuff that's not going to help me. I'll just go with this. And there are two details, but one here is the rainfall on the ground like wet ground isn't necessarily so bad. Gray skies universally like seen as something that's kind of depressing. So that's the one I went with. There we go. You know, relatable being half British. Yeah, I thought you might appreciate that British weather moment, right? Yeah, British. Yeah. Yeah, this seems like a British person in the description. I want to go to England so bad. I want to get out there. Okay. Like, I'm glad the five minutes videos helped you out most often. Thank you. I hope that those were helpful for you all. I kind of went on a tear with those did a whole bunch of them. Literature and poetry, man, I want to go back a little bit to the punctuation topics with regards to a couple of the other punctuation types and some of the other things you all have asked about. So let's let me see here. I just want to scroll back up real quick and try to address a bunch of different things for people. Yeah, complex series and you've asked about this one. This is actually a good time to talk about that. This is the one and only time where you must use a semicolon. Okay, there is one situation in the English language where a semicolon must be used. And that is what is known as the complex list or the complex series depending on how you want to like call it complex list. Essentially, this is a list with sub commas. I'm kind of inventing a term here. Forgive me, but let me show you what I mean. All right. I always like to go with the dinner party example. I invited three friends. All right. It doesn't really matter how I punctuate this. I just I want to set up the context and then I'm going to go down here and write the rest of that for you. All right. So let me let me just scroll this down a little bit. All right. I'm going to make a sentence about these three people. Okay. I'm starting off my list. I've introduced Tony Hawk, a man who I hold him very high esteem. I've added extra information about Tony Hawk that he is the world's best skate legend, you know. And now what do I want to do? I want to continue talking about other people who I have invited to dinner. Here's the problem. Okay. The problem is that I've got this extra information about Tony Hawk. Now, in a traditional list, we just use commas to separate the people. If I write another comma here, this is person one. This is person two. Tony Hawk and the world's best skate legend who is not Tony Hawk are coming to my dinner party. Clearly we're about to have like some sort of ex games, you know, throw down. I'm going to empty out the swimming pool and two skaters are going to go at it. And then there's a third person who we have yet to mention. So in this list, because I'm trying to give you information about Tony Hawk, I can't continue to use a comma. I have to change it up. I got to use a semicolon here. Okay. Now I use a semicolon and by doing that, you know that I'm telling you about Tony Hawk not introducing another person. Now, this is all about the same person. This is the same person. It's all information. And I can then continue my list. Right. My mom, who is awesome. She is. Shout out to mom. Mother's Day is coming up. Everybody get your stuff ready. Treat your mom's nice. All right. Okay. So again, I've added extra information about mom by using comma who making a little extra, you know, detail. I'm going to use another semicolon so that it's, you know, separated for the third person that's coming in our list. Right. And yeah. And we'll use and like we usually do to close out a list. Right. And the ghost George Washington, though he hasn't confirmed, I'm still waiting for the ghost of George Washington to get back to me. Um, you know, I said I'm like an RSVP thingy in the mail and I don't know. We'll see. So again, this is a, this is a good example of this. If you ever see, and I'll be honest, I don't think this is going to appear much on the test, but it's good to know. Like this is the one time where I have to use a semicolon because in this case I've got these extra details. And if I don't use the semicolon, it then creates confusion. We always avoid confusion. Anytime that we're working on the SAT, we want to make sure we avoid confusion. And I think that that is something that is a good rule to remember for all those grammar questions, all those punctuation questions, you know, even like some of those ones where you're reducing or simplifying the sentence a little bit or even like vocabulary, like anything that could create confusion is not what you want. You want to make sure the, the meaning is crystal clear. So what, by punctuating it this way, I've made it crystal clear. We know that Tony Hawk is the world's best skate legend. According to me, we know that my mom is awesome. And we know that the George, ghost of George Washington was also invited to this dinner suave. And I've got these three people that I've invited. So it's perfect this way. This is the one time in life where you must. Okay. Um, yeah, like, okay, dashes dashes is a good one too and possession. Oh, yeah, possession. Okay, possessive s is easy. We can look at that real fast. Yeah, we could talk about that. Um, let me see what else you got here. By the way, guys, what's a good score? Like, yo, um, if you're over like 1250 total, you're already doing great. You're already in the top quarter of all people on the planet. If you got like 1300 plus, you can send that anywhere literally. You can send a 1350 anywhere. I really mean that. Like the SAT I promise you is not going to be the determining factor on with very few exceptions. I think the few exceptions are like schools that do place a lot of value on it like MIT or Georgetown or Purdue. Like, yeah, there's some schools that do care, but most schools don't. They really don't care that much. It is, I have talked to so many admissions officers. Okay. I, for those of you who've checked out my university videos, I often interview them and I even ask them about their test policies and try to incorporate that into the videos. I have talked to more than 30 different people in admissions. I've been in seminars and conferences about this topic. Okay. I'm not just making this up. Most of them all agree that it's just a checkbox item. Okay. They look at the SAT score. They, they say, okay, this score is fine for us and they move on. They do not give it serious consideration. They're not sitting there going, well, buddy does have a good SAT score. Maybe like, no, it's literally just, do we require a test? Yes. Is your test result within the range of acceptable test results? Okay. Moving on. It doesn't even have a lot of weight in the application process anymore. So like, don't sweat too hard for this thing. Okay. Please trust me on this. I, while I have 34 computers here, let me just take a brief moment to say this really clearly to everyone. It's not the most important thing. Okay. There are many other things that you can do on your applications that will give you more of a boost than just another 50 or 100 points on the SAT. Like I feel like getting another 150 points in the SAT maybe increases your chances by like one or 2%. Writing an awesome essay could increase your chances by 10 or 20%. You know, like that's, that's where I would like to see you start putting some of your efforts into everybody just for the record. Okay. And, and yo, 35 and the IB congrats. That's solid guys. By the way, IB schools, if you got those, those are good grades. MIT probably even more than 40 plus to be straight with you. Like MIT is crazy hard. And you got to make sure you have their calculus requirements and stuff met that you've taken all the high level like difficult math courses and stuff in there. Those are facts. But why do you want to go to IVs in MIT? Like why? What's so special about those schools? Are you sure those are the best options for you? Like I know that they got name recognition, but there's so much more to it. Like, I think Ferraris are awesome, but I don't want to drive one in Lima, Peru. That thing's going to get crashed into it's going to scrape curbs. It's going to get hit by speed bumps. I'm going to have somebody steal my windows. Like you know, it's not necessarily what's best for me. It might be the best car on the planet, but it's not necessarily best for me. And I think it's really important that everybody analyze their colleges. If you're just applying to top schools because they're the top schools, that's going to actually hurt your chances. Because that means you don't have a great reason to be there. Your reason for being there is just because it's the top. It's the best. I want to be there because I want the best. And the best is not what you have determined to be the best. It's what a bunch of list making people have determined to be the best. And when you think about what these universities really want, they love to see people who are independent, people who are creating their own path forward, people who know what they want. If you're applying to top universities just because they are top universities, you have not really thought about what you really want. You have not made your own decisions. You have listened to somebody else. And they will notice that. And I think that that is something that's really important here. Like when I look at the people that I've helped to get into those top schools, those people, all of them would have been happy at a bunch of other universities. They were not applying only to top schools. They had just a couple on their list that they really liked. And they had a bunch of other options. They had, you know, public schools, private schools, they had a bunch of options. They built a list that they loved. They would have been happy at any of the places they got into. And they just happened to have a couple of top schools on their list and they got in. And I think because they weren't simping so hard for those top schools, that helped them. That made it easier for them to get in because it was clear that like they would be successful wherever they went. They had a plan for their life. They had a plan for the studies. They were going to go far with or without Columbia, with or without Dartmouth, with or without Brown or Cornell. And because of that, those top schools like them, they go, you know what, this is who I want. This person's got a plan. This person's got a vision. This person has figured everything out. And I want them to be on my notable alumni page in the future. Do not chase prestige. Please, please, please. Prestige is not the thing you need. Trust me. You need a better plan than that. All right. End of speech. Okay. Yeah. Can you get into a top 50 college with 1450? Absolutely. Absolutely you can. You can get into a bunch. You can get into a top 50 college test optional, dude, with a full scholarship even possibly. It's totally possible. And we got to talk about that in other days. When will scores come out probably in a couple of weeks? That's what I would expect here. What do you actually need to read for every question type is a good question. It's hard to, hard to give you a single answer because obviously every question type is different. When you are filling in a blank, you focus on the blank and that sentence, you may need to read what comes before that. If it is, you know, using phrases like these or those referencing something from before, you may have to go back one more sentence. If it's a transition word, obviously you're going to read the sentence before and after the transition. You need to know both of those sides. So if it's filling the blank, you generally want to read that sentence plus the one before, maybe the one after. That's usually how it goes. For other ones that are like main ideas, purpose of the sentence, function of the sentence, like you're going to read the first part to know what the whole paragraph is about and then find what you need there. So if it's those underlined sentences, you just read that along with the first sentence to know what you're talking about. If it's supporting claims, you've got to find the claim. You've got to know where to look. That's often at the end or you may have to search for a word like believes, claims, argues, thinks. You know, you search for that word that lets you know this is where the claim is. That's what you do. So I can't always tell you where those things are going to be, but you've got to know how to look for them. You have to know how to search, how to scan for specific words so that you can then expand and extract that information. That's what I do all the time. I look for keywords and just little words tell me a lot about what I'm reading. I'll crack open a little poetry stuff from what I showed you. I don't have a lot of extra material to be honest for the poetry stuff, sadly. But I have a couple sets that I can show you real quick and these are some of the ones I talked about in that video too. But like the, oh, infinitive and non-infinitive, that almost never shows up. Infinitive is just when you use to, when you say to be or not to be. That's infinitive. Non-infinitive means it's conjugated or it has an ing. That's usually not much of a topic on the SAT from what I've seen. Okay, so minimum score in the SAT for Harvard to Stanford. There is none. Hollow, there is no minimum score for the SAT for Harvard to Stanford. Okay. There is no score that guarantees you admission and there are people that get in test optional. So there is no minimum score. Harvard rejects people with a 1600 SAT every year. Okay, even perfect score people don't get into Harvard because there are more perfect scores than there are seats and that's why I'm telling you again, SAT is not that important there. Like, does it matter? Sure. Should you have one? Probably. But is it the thing that's going to get you in? No. If you have 1500, should you kill yourself to get 1600? No. Why? The 100 points is not going to make the difference. Trust me. It's not. And I think, by the way, I must say this out here, this is a little bit of a controversial topic, but this is something I want to address. I made a video not long ago about why there's this lawsuit against Harvard about race and there's this whole allegation of Harvard being racist towards Asian students in particular, expecting them to have higher SAT scores. Now, I have seen the lawsuit. I've read also the decision from the previous court. I have looked at both sides of this argument. I think there is some merit to both sides. I do think that Harvard has put a de facto quota on the number of Asians that they will admit. In that way, I do think they have discriminated against Asian people. But the argument that Harvard requires Asians to get higher SAT scores, I think, is a little bit wrong because here's what I think. I think that a lot of the Asian population, and I don't want to generalize, you guys can tell me what you think. Do you think I'm right when I say this? I think a lot of the Asian population focuses more on the SAT than they should. And as a result, they tend to have higher scores because they place more value on the SAT. And so it's not that Harvard is requiring Asian people to necessarily have higher SAT scores. It's that that is what a lot of the Asian applicants are bringing. And they maybe should be focusing on some other things in their applications. Maybe they're not focusing enough on essays. Maybe they're not focusing enough on extracurriculars. There could be some other aspects because it's a holistic review process. And I think that's something to keep in mind. I think that if all you do, if you make your application process about the SAT, you're not going to have the best results because you're putting too much value on something that doesn't have that much value. It really doesn't anymore. The times have changed. And I want to support you with the SAT. I know this is stressful and important. It is still important. You can still get scholarships. You can still get great things, but this isn't everything. So Asian families focus more on exams. I feel like that is what I've seen in my experience too. And again, I'm not trying to criticize anybody here or make anyone feel bad. I think we just have different cultural focuses. And it makes sense if you come from a country that has really strong exams where the exams do determine your future. I could understand why parents maybe feel that way. I've seen that here in Peru. A lot of the old school parents had to take admissions tests to get into college. And so they think that the SAT is what determines their kid's future. And I have to explain to them all the time, dude, why are you making your kid do 40 hours of class a week? Chill out. The SAT is not that big of a deal, but it's an admission test. No, it's not. It's not an admission test. So I think sometimes there's that cultural barrier where we think something is what it is when it's not. All right. So yeah, maybe Panda like what you're saying. That's what I'm trying to say. Maybe a perfect score is not the key to anything. It does not unlock any... I mean, I wish you did get like a little achievement unlocked trophy from like College Board if you get a 1600, but you don't. So yeah, that's how I feel about that. All right. Let me hop into this poetry stuff for a minute here because I want to touch on that a little bit. We only got about 15, 20 minutes. So I want to get to some of this. Again, I went through this one a little bit in my short video, but I want to go in more detail I think with you all because there's a lot of things I would have liked to keep in that video, but I was trying to make these videos quickly and also keep them kind of short and to the point so that you could sort of see the main strategies. But I want to go into more detail here. This one from my poetry set, well, it's mixed. It has some poetry. It has some other things that are not poetry. If you take a look at this, I'm looking for the main idea. So what I would need to do is get big picture things, main ideas, not details. Little details don't help me. Little, little specific descriptions don't help me. Poetry likes to get colorful. It likes to describe stuff. And that is going to be a waste of my time for main ideas. So I have to know when I'm reading to like stop reading. I need to know, okay, at this point that the poem is going to give me a bunch of stupid BS details that I don't need. So I'm going to keep moving. So right here, I met a traveler from an antique land who said too fast and trunkless legs of stones stand in the desert. Okay. He, I see that this is in quotes. I see that we're talking about like legs of stone. So maybe like a statue in the desert, but I see that this is in quotes and I see that those quotes go pretty far. Right. And I see that like all this is like more description, more description. And I don't need to read this. As soon as I see this, I know what he's talking about. I'm good. I don't need to read every little detail about the statue. And, and then when I see a break in the stanza, like a new stanza, like a new paragraph, I'm going to read that part because that matters. And on the pedestal, these words appear, my name is Osamanteus, king of kings, look at my works, he mighty and despair. That matters. That seems important. That's in the middle of the poem. It's right there. It's like big words. Sounds cool. Sounds like Osamanteus was a cool dude. Nothing beside remains around the decay of that. All right. This is more description, right? But I got the main idea here and here and here. Like this is all I need to read. This is all I need. I, again, poetry loves to repeat the idea or describe the same thing in multiple ways. Look at the last stanza. Nothing beside remains around the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level. Like this is just all the same thing. Nothing remains. And then there's four lines describing how there's just a bunch of sand. That's all it is. Poetry is not that complicated for real. It's actually a lot simpler than we think. There's usually only a couple of simple ideas in a poem and they just sort of reiterate them or evolve them throughout the poem, but it's not that complex. Here, again, five lines to repeat the same thing in this line. Five, six more lines that just describe something that they just summarized here. So I really don't need to read all of this stuff. Make sure you don't read the whole poem. Keep it simple. Focus on what actually matters. Like, yeah, dashes, Panda. I'm going to hit you up with the dashes too. Thank you for reminding me. All right. So just peeking around a little bit at some of your comments and such here. Yeah. And yeah, Panda, you're right about building a profile subjective. Like, I'm going to talk about that in more videos. We're going to get into that stuff here in this channel and I want to walk people through this whole process. In fact, next week, I'm going to come up with a video about how to make your college list. I'm going to give you all a excel tool that you can use like a Google sheet that you can download and you can use. I'm already designing everything for you. Like my goal is to give you the materials that you need to succeed on your own. You know, we here at score provide that service for people. We help people directly by giving them a counselor if they want it. And that's something that we've done for hundreds of people. But like there's a lot of people that can't afford that. I want to help them out too. There's a lot of people that are just capable of doing it on their own and would rather do it on their own. And hey, good for you. Like go for it. Let me give you some resources, you know. So yeah, we're going to jump into that, that other punctuation. Let's talk a little bit about those M dashes because I think that that kind of is all I have to say on poetry. Besides what I said in that other video, you can check that out if you want. Rocking on the M dash. Okay, let's let's talk about the M dash. The M dash, it's called the M dash because it's more or less the width of an M fun fact, not to be confused with the hyphen or the end dash. Now M dash is something that you can use to replace other kinds of punctuations. It does not have any unique function. There is no situation on planet earth where I must use an M dash. Okay, that's rule number one. Never is mandatory, but it could be the best answer given the circumstances. So the thing is, anytime I'm going to choose the M dash, it's because the better or the normal punctuation is not one of those choices, right? So an M dash can replace a colon, it can replace a comma, but only for extra info for the record, for extra info, you would not just use this in place of commas normally for like connecting clauses or connecting words like only if you're adding extra info. And also you can use it for parentheses, which is kind of the same thing, right? For extra info. All right, that's what we're talking about here, extra info. So that's where I can use this. Okay, I can replace a colon for any reason. All right, but I can use it for commas or parentheses with extra info. So what we will see a lot of times on the SAT are questions where instead of commas, instead of colons, instead of parentheses, they will give you the M dash as an option. And they want to know if you know that you can use it. That's really all there is to it. They just want to know that you know that you can use it. There's only usually a couple of questions like this on any given test, but like here's a good example. Like if I started writing a paragraph about child protective services, CPS is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All right, so this is how you might normally do this, right? If you want to introduce the like acronym or abbreviation CPS for Child Protective Services, you could normally put that in parentheses to give that extra information to let people know, hey, we're going to refer to it as CPS from now on. Okay, I don't feel like writing child protective services. So I'm just going to put it in like three letters. Cool, great. Okay. You could also use M dashes here instead of parentheses for extra info. That's acceptable. Like I could just go done. Still okay. Still correct. Looks weird. Still okay. No problem. So yeah. Another case, maybe I use some extra information in a comma, right? I love baking. My doctor's like, yo, you got to go easy on the bacon. I've cut back on my bacon consumption considerably in recent years to be fair. I got to start thinking about my future. All right, I love bacon comma, which my doctor just likes. Again, I'm adding some extra information. This is the extra info. And I've got a comma to do that, which is normally how I would do it. But maybe because I was raised by animals and my parents didn't love me or something, I want to use an M dash. I don't know. I'm weird, I guess. And I use M dashes. I love bacon M dash, which my doctor dislikes. This would also be acceptable. There's nothing wrong with this sentence. I personally think it's weird. I don't know why you would do this. But some people want to use M dashes. I don't understand those people. I personally don't understand it because your keyboard does not have an M dash button. Why would you want to use a punctuation mark that isn't on your keyboard? Why would I use an optional mark that's harder for me to type? Like I don't understand who uses these things seriously. I feel like they all need to be medically evaluated, you know, but okay, I shouldn't judge. So how can you differentiate an M dash from a comma? Very good question, Panda. Very simple. Is it extra information? This is extra information. I can use it. Let's take another case where maybe it's not, you know, how let's imagine I wanted to continue this paragraph. Okay, again, let's just imagine I made a new sentence here. However, comma, bacon is just too delicious to give up comma, which means I'll continue to eat it. Now, I can replace one of these commas with M dashes because one of these commas is for extra information. I cannot replace the other one because the other one is necessary. It is necessary punctuation following a transition word. And that would be here, right? Only for extra information. Exactly, Panda. Again, the colon, you could also do that. I could use two M dashes if the extra information is in the middle of an independent clause, right? In this case, though, this part in the middle is not extra information. This part in the middle is the clause. This is the important information. So here I cannot change to an M dash, but here I can. Here I could say M dash, which means I'll continue to eat it. That would be acceptable. So they're really just for extra info. That's really all that matters. Oh yeah, people, you'll need the link real quick for the folder. Let me just drop that in the chat while everybody's here. I'll just slap that in the chat for all of you. Boom. Slap it in the chat. Let's go. That's the drive folder for all of the material, all your needs. Everything is in there. Everything that I've used pretty much is in there. I really don't, I'm not holding out on you. I promise I don't have a bunch more awesome secret material. I've busted my butt for three or four months and Tyler helped me out a lot. Shout out to Tyler. Everybody mad respect for Tyler. You'll notice his name is on the bottom of a lot of those exercises because he really helped us out with that. And I still had to go through and still had to review and also like, yo, shout out to the Malik also on the channel for like checking out. He actually helped me do some of the review and caught some typos and mistakes and stuff. Just like super big thank you to people helping me out with these things because like, yo, yeah, Tyler really, really, Tyler is just a legend guys. He's quietly helped out with a bunch of things on this channel. Like he's actually done a bunch of subtitles too for some of the older videos that I have about like studying in different countries. And some of those subtitles even have little jokes in them that he wrote in there. Like there's these lovely little touches in the channel that like Tyler has just done. Okay. Okay. I heard about this before. Like not essential clauses. Like if we're just talking like essentially extra information, you might put that between two commas. Like I might have, you know, a little extra information about someone's name or like, you know, like for example, Julia something. I'm running out of ability to come up with creative names. A researcher at heart or since we've been talking about her is going to do whatever. I don't care what she's going to do. Look, this is a great example. Like you have extra information between two commas. This is extra information. I could delete this and the sentence would be just fine. And I would normally put that between two commas. We could also use two m dashes here if we really wanted to. Again, if that's the choice that they give me, I guess I could do that. But yeah, this is just a non essential class man. This is all it's like, it's just extra information. And you can put extra information kind of, you know, ideally you want to put extra information right after the thing you were talking about. You know, I wouldn't make sense to throw this way later. I want, I want to keep this information about Julia next to her name. That's kind of just common sense. Like you want to keep it close together, right? But that's, but that's really it. Like, yeah, I mean, talking about something they mentioned the person's name, like, colon is used to define or elaborate mazzi. I can do that for you. I love me some colons. Okay, you say like the person's name does an important action. I mean, yeah. Like, I'm, I guess I'm not sure what, like maybe if you had an example or something like I could maybe find it if you had one from like one of the exercises or something. I'm not sure I follow. Nikun's huge difference, colons and semicolons are two completely different things. So there's really no point in comparing them. Like you would not really normally use colons with two independent clauses anyway. Normally, we don't want to do that. I mean, you could, but again, just think about what the colon is for. The colon is there to define something to clarify, to explain, right? Like when it's really necessary. So here's a good example of that, right? Let's say I have a, let's say I bought a car. Let's say I bought a car, but I still have a problem. All right. Here I have introduced a sort of vague concept in this sentence, which is a problem. Like if I said this to you out loud, you would probably be like, what's that? What's the problem? What? Like you would want to know what the problem is. And so that's a great place to slap a colon down like so and then explain what that problem is. Right? Maybe I say gas prices are crazy. Here you go. Here's an example with an independent clause just for you guys. All right. Since you've asked about it, like I can do this. This is fine. This is acceptable. You know, I don't even need to say are crazy. I could just say gas prices, but like almost like a comedian, you know, like punchline set up kind of thing. Like, I mean, you can do it that way. You could just say I bought a car, but I still have a problem gas prices. Or I still have a problem that person that I run over. Oh man, I can't get him out from under my car. Like you can have some fun with the colon. The point is I'm trying to explain what that problem is. Okay. That problem that I just introduced, I want to specify it more. So I use a colon to do that. That's really all there is to it. So that's how we want to go. I can say, I can just say gas prices. I don't even need a complete sentence here. I don't need to have an independent clause. I could just have a fragment. Like, you know, I could delete this and it still works because colons are awesome. They let you break a lot of rules and have a lot of fun. They're my favorite punctuation. I don't know about you, but yeah, like the biologist Amelia blah, blah, found an important thing. Yeah, exactly. Okay. That's perfect. That's exactly what you want to do. It's a, it's a non-essential clause. Like the example I was just giving, like you could do that too. Instead of saying, I mean, normally I would put the name first and then I would say what that person was. But like, yeah, if they were already referencing a biologist and then they wanted to insert her name after they, you could do that. That would work just fine. There's nothing wrong with doing that. I mean, it's a little awkward because why not just write their name first and then say what they do? But it works. It's okay. Nothing right. Nothing wrong with that. All right. What else? Yo, I love how the questions are sarcastic sometimes. I also get that way with a lot of my stuff. Yeah. All right. Comma's place sentence you've written. There should be a comma before, but no, there's no comma's place. A comma's place means I've joined two independent clauses with a comma. I didn't do that. And I bought a car, but it's still a problem. I don't have to use a comma before, but I can. I don't have to. Like with those, remember those like sometimes they're called the fanboys. That's the acronym that is used for like those kinds of connecting words like and and norm, but and or and yet and so like the simple ones like you don't necessarily need a comma before those. It's optional. It's okay to say I bought a car comma, but I still have a problem. It's also okay to omit that. So a lot of times I think on the SAT no comma is also a good choice. There's I feel like a lot of times no punctuation is the right answer because they want to see if you know that you don't need it. You know, they like to play with those optional scenarios to see if you know the options. So just keep that in mind. There's a lot of things that, you know, sometimes look, there's ways that we're taught and then there's ways that we can do things. Keep that in mind. I think a lot of times we all have teachers that told us you have to do it this way and sometimes they're wrong. Sometimes that's not true. I had a teacher that swore by the semicolon. She, she worshiped at the temple of the semicolon and she would correct my work and put semicolons in it. And I personally hated them and I was like, you can't really tell me I have to use this because every style guide says it's optional and I choose not to. So we, that's how I know the one rule where you do have to because then she sat me down and explained that. But my point is like, you know, there's a lot of things that aren't always required. So know what you can and cannot do. Know what is, what, what options are out there. And when it comes to punctuation, everybody, if you're preparing for June and you still got time, read, read. Oh my God, read, read, read. Like the more you read good writing, like read books, read fiction, read, read stories, like stuff that you like. The more you read, the more you are exposed to good examples of writing, you're going to get exposed to good use of vocabulary, good punctuation. Like why not read? Because reading is literally going to give you access to some of the best examples possible. And as you train your brain, you're going to know what, what works and what doesn't. There are times where I do not know why something is wrong, but I know immediately that it is wrong. And I, I can stop and analyze it and explain it, but I can just market and move on on the test because I know I can just feel it. I'm like that comma shouldn't be there. I can read it in my head and notice that there's no pause and I shouldn't pause there. So why is there a comma there? That's wrong. Like because I've read hundreds of books and because I've written my own actually for fun, maybe one day that'll be like a Patreon thing. I'll let you read my book. Like I've done a lot of creative writing myself and professional article writing for clients and stuff. Like because I write a lot and because I read a lot, it's really, really easy for me to know these rules. And that's something you can do too, right? Like go open up Grammarly and start writing and pay attention to the mistakes that you make. Read as much as you can, like fill your brain with more stuff. All right. Oh, it eat a banana. Okay. It's 100% correct on this. Eat a banana. So, yeah. Anyway, that's all the time I'm going to have because I got to get going because I got this meeting at 11 that I got to take and it's the start of the work day. I squeezed this into the morning for everybody. I hope that you have great results on your test. I really do. I wish you but the best of luck on your SAT. I do want to continue to do these streams before the test and do a couple like little extra class streams for everybody probably leading up to the June test. I will do a couple sessions. I do feel like I've made enough content to kind of cover most people's needs for the digital SAT. So, I'm not going to just become a straight up digital SAT channel. There's already people out there doing that. I think you can get plenty of support that way but I do want to continue to support people. So, again, please in the question, like in the comments, ask any questions you need. Feel free to hit me up. You can go to, oh, oh, real quick, real quick. Let me show you this real quick. This is something that you should see before I go because I wanted to explain two things that I think are really important to everybody because I keep getting these questions and it drives me insane. First of all, if you do want to hit me up on WhatsApp, you can actually go to prepwithscore.com. It automatically directs me to the Peru page but there's a little WhatsApp button and you can hit me up there and actually talk with me pretty much any time you want if you have a question. If you're actually interested in buying stuff, you can schedule a meeting or whatever, or we can just talk. And also, like in our, in these apps, a million people, I think all of you are people that have already figured this out but everybody asked me like, oh, why doesn't the button work? And that's because if you're opening it in Google Drive, it doesn't work. You have to download it. And I use Adobe Acrobat Reader because I pay for Adobe. So, yeah, anyway, those two things I just wanted to say because I always get people asking me about those two things and feel like I needed to explain that real quick. So, yeah, there's that. But yeah, banana is good for you. Trust me, banana helps. Banana, I had one this morning and I feel like this was a great stream. So, there's a correlation right there. Banana all the way. Again, thank you all so much for being here. Really appreciate all the support of the channel and just how much it's grown. Thanks to all of you. Yesterday was a record. We have 50 new subs in a single day, which is mind blowing to me. I am super grateful and I hope you get the score that you're hoping for. Like, I hope you get what you want. I hope that score helps you get what you want. And I hope too that you consider giving all of the other parts of your application equal consideration. And if not more. And that's what we're going to start transitioning into in the next few months on this channel is talking about other things that you have to do for your applications. I'm going to show you how to write essays, show you how to get your letters of recommendation, show you how to build your CD so that you have like a solid resume with good extracurriculars, show you how to choose colleges intelligently, and even how to figure out your odds of getting into them. So, I've got all that stuff lined up. I got a bunch of content queued up and planned. Like, I've been very much inspired by all of you. So, thank you again. And yeah, I'll see you next week. Okay? We have another video coming out today too in like an hour and a half, the last one about quantitative stuff. So, there's one more short SAT video and then I'm moving on. All right. So, it has been a pleasure. Take care, everybody. See you later.