News & Articles
Expert tips, strategies, and free resources — straight from our tutors and founder.
An inference is a conclusion the text strongly implies but never states outright. The secret is discipline: the right answer is the smallest logical step the passage supports — not the most dramatic one.
Behind every passage is one central point and a reason the author wrote it. Learn to separate the main idea from the supporting details — and to name the author's purpose in a single verb — and the most common reading questions become predictable.
Four quick measures summarize any data set. The mean is the balance point, the median is the middle, the mode is the most frequent, and the range is the spread. Knowing how each reacts to an outlier is what the tests really check.
A percent is just a fraction out of 100. Master three moves — finding a percent, finding percent change, and reversing a markup — and you handle taxes, tips, discounts, and a whole genre of SAT, ACT, and SSAT word problems.
A quadratic is any equation with an x-squared term, and its graph is the familiar parabola. There are four ways to solve one — and the quadratic formula always works, even when nothing factors cleanly.
Ratios compare quantities; proportions set two ratios equal; unit rates boil a comparison down to "per one." This trio is the single most-tested idea in standardized math — and cross-multiplication solves nearly all of it.
A scatterplot shows how two variables move together. Draw the line that best follows the cloud of points, and you can describe the relationship, predict new values, and read meaning from slope and intercept.
When two unknowns meet two equations, there's almost always exactly one answer — the point where two lines cross. Substitution and elimination are the two reliable ways to find it, and knowing when to use each is the whole skill.
Three dimensions sound intimidating, but almost every solid on a test is just a 2D shape extended or stacked. Learn the family of formulas and the one big idea behind them, and 3D problems shrink to arithmetic.
