SAT Critical Reading - Recognizing Mood and Tone

The Critical Reading section of the SAT  measures student aptitude in variety of reading comprehension  skills, including main idea, inferencing, text development and vocabulary as well as the author's point of view. 

A common SAT question is, “Determine the mood or tone of the author.” How can you do this? The answer isn’t so simple.

Questions about mood or tone often rely on your knowledge of vocabulary. In order to figure out whether the author is lamenting or obfuscating the details of an event, you first need to know what these words mean.

Start building your vocabulary by reading sample SAT passages with questions and answers. The answer choices for these questions are filled with descriptive words. Write these adjectives on blank flashcards. Look the words up in the dictionary and write the meaning on the other side.

Here are a few adjectives that may appear in questions about mood and tone: informative, skeptical, confused, and ambivalent, contemptuous, satirical, observant, intolerant.

How many of these words do you know? How many of these words seem unfamiliar to you?

Look at the following sentence:

“Tate’s statement that people can rely on one another for help is churlish, like that of a spoiled and undeserving child.”

If you were asked the mood or tone of this sentence, and your answer choices were:

a) naïve  b) kind  c) sardonic   d) neutral  e) amused

you would probably choose c), sardonic. It would help if you knew that sardonic means “characterized by scorn or cynicism.”

Looking up adjectives for mood and tone questions will help you build vocabulary for many other types of questions, including other questions based around reading passages and sentence completion questions. 

Think Tutoring has SAT Prep programs that can help your child expand his vocabulary, improve reading comprehension skills, and increase his scores on the SAT test.  Call us at 973-593-0050 for more information.