Underlined Text

Underlined Sentences

What are they

On the SAT, there are several exercises where you are asked to find the underlined sentence and describe their purpose/ main idea. These types of questions are generally dependent on the text as a whole to be difficult.

​A study by a team including finance professor Madhu Veeraraghavan suggests that exposure to sunshine during the workday can lead to overly optimistic behavior. Using data spanning from 1994 to 2010 for a set of US companies, the team compared over 29,000 annual earnings forecasts to the actual earnings later reported by those companies. The team found that the greater the exposure to sunshine at work in the two weeks before a manager submitted an earnings forecast, the more the manager’s forecast exceeded what the company actually earned that year.

Which choice best states the function of the underlined sentence in the overall structure of the text?

1. To summarize the results of the team’s analysis

2. To present a specific example that illustrates the study’s findings

3. To explain part of the methodology used in the team’s study

4. To call out a challenge the team faced in conducting its analysis

Tips

• Filter the underlined text into a category of context, action, dialogue, etc

• Eliminate the obvious wrong answers.

• Summarize the next sentence to find the effect and confirm.

​Lily had no real intimacy with nature, but she had a passion for the appropriate and could be keenly sensitive to a scene which was the fitting background of her own sensations. The landscape outspread below her seemed an enlargement of her present mood, and she found something of herself in its calmness, its breadth, its long free reaches. On the nearer slopes the sugar-maples wavered like pyres of light; lower down was a massing of grey orchards, and here and there the lingering green of an oak-grove.

Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?

1. It creates a detailed image of the physical setting of the scene.

2. It establishes that a character is experiencing an internal conflict

3. It makes an assertion that the next sentence then expands on.

4. It illustrates an idea that is introduced in the previous sentence.

Multiple Choice

The stranger still stood in the exact middle of the cottage, where he had first planted himself. His singularity impelled a closer scrutiny. A lean, gloomy figure. Hair dark and lank, mattedly streaked over his brow. His sunken pitfalls of eyes were ringed by indigo halos, and played with an innocuous sort of lightning: the gleam without the bolt. The whole man was dripping. He stood in a puddle on the bare oak floor: his strange walking-stick vertically resting at his side.

Which choice best states the function of the underlined sentence in the overall structure of the text?

• It sets up the character description presented in the sentences that follow.

• It establishes a contrast with the description in the previous sentence.

• It elaborates on the previous sentence’s description of the character.

• It introduces the setting that is described in the sentences that follow.

Multiple Choice

Researchers have found a nearly 164,000-year-old molar from a member of the archaic human species known as Denisovans in a cave in Laos, suggesting that Denisovans lived in a wider range of environments than indicated by earlier evidence. Before the discovery, Denisovans were thought to have lived only at high altitudes in relatively cold climates in what are now Russia and China, but the discovery of the tooth in Laos suggests that they may have lived at low altitudes in relatively warm climates in Southeast Asia as well.

Which choice best states the function of the underlined portion in the text as a whole?

• It defines a term used in the description that follows in the rest of the sentence.

• It emphasizes the main goal of the research introduced in the previous sentence.

• It provides context that clarifies the significance of the information that follows in the rest of the sentence.

• It dismisses as untrue the research presented in the previous sentence.

Multiple Choice

People whose desire is solely for self-realisation never know where they are going. They can't know. In one sense of the word it is of course necessary to know oneself: that is the first achievement of knowledge. But to recognise that the soul of a man is unknowable, is the ultimate achievement of wisdom. The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?

Which choice best describes the function of the underlined question in the text as a whole?

• It cautions readers that the text's directions for how to achieve self-knowledge are hard to follow.

• It concedes that the definition of self-knowledge advanced in the text is unpopular.

• It reinforces the text's skepticism about the possibility of truly achieving self-knowledge.

• It speculates that some readers will share the doubts expressed in the text about the value of self-knowledge.

Multiple Choice

Perhaps ten-year-old John was puzzling to the folk there in the Florida woods for he was an imaginative child and fond of day-dreams. The St. John River flowed a scarce three hundred feet from his back door. On its banks at this point grow numerous palms, luxuriant magnolias and bay trees. On the bosom of the stream float millions of delicately colored hyacinths. [John Redding] loved to wander down to the water’s edge, and, casting in dry twigs, watch them sail away down stream to Jacksonville, the sea, the wide world and [he] wanted to follow them.

Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?

• It provides an extended description of a location that John likes to visit.

• It reveals that some residents of John’s town are confused by his behavior

• It illustrates the uniqueness of John’s imagination compared to the imaginations of other children

• It suggests that John longs to experience a larger life outside the Florida woods.

Multiple Choice

According to historian Vicki L. Ruiz, Mexican American women made crucial contributions to the labor movement during World War II. At the time, food processing companies entered into contracts to supply United States armed forces with canned goods. Increased production quotas conferred greater bargaining power on the companies’ employees, many of whom were Mexican American women: employees insisted on more favorable benefits, and employers, who were anxious to fulfill the contracts, complied. Thus, labor activism became a platform for Mexican American women to assert their agency.

Which choice best describes the function of the underlined portion in the text as a whole?

• It elaborates on a claim about labor relations in a particular industry made earlier in the text

• It offers an example of a trend in the World War II–era economy discussed earlier in the text.

• It notes a possible exception to the historical narrative of labor activism sketched earlier in the text.

• It provides further details about the identities of the workers discussed earlier in the text.

Bye2