So this is the first post in a series of posts aimed at helping both my students and any other interested readers learn to read more critically. For a more in depth discussion of my motivation here and why this skill is so important, both on the SAT and in real-life, please see my post “Thinking Critically on the SAT and Beyond.”
In each of these posts I will place a link to an article and then ask some questions that will force you to think critically about the passage. That will be followed by an accompanying post that will provide some analysis of the passage and “answers” to the questions. I put “answers” in quotation marks because I don’t claim to possess a monopoly on the truth and in some cases there may be some room for interpretation, but I will attempt to avoid questions whose answers are ambiguous (since this really won’t happen on the SAT either) and the “answers” I provide will give you some sense of how the passage should be interpreted. So if you are close, that is probably fine, but if you are way off then you may have missed the point of the passage.
I plan to write some more posts about how to read critically, but I am starting with a relatively easy passage that I think most people will be able to understand and break down. Briefly, one of the keys is not to read for facts and details but to try to think about the author who wrote the passage. What was his or her intention in the passage and how do the parts of the passage function to support that purpose or intention?
Without further ado, here is the link to a New York Times opinion piece (these are generally very good articles to practice reading).
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/30/opinion/david-brooks-being-who-we-are.html?ref=international&_r=0
Try to answer the following questions and see the accompanying post for some analysis of the passage:
What is the author’s overall argument?
What evidence does the author present to support that argument?
How would you describe the tone of the passage and why?
Does the author address what the counter-argument might be or defend himself from objections that others may have to his argument?
Can you infer the meaning of the word buttress or buttressing from the context of the passage and what are the clues that suggest its meaning? (Hint: It appears in the middle of the passage and then again at the end, but the way it is used in context in the middle of the article – in the paragraph beginning, “The way not to approach the Middle East…” – makes it fairly easy to guess what the meaning is.)
For analysis of the above passage and “answers” to the above questions, see the Analysis Post.