Sat math Essentials

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F i n d i n g F o u r I n c o r r e c t A n s w e r
C h o i c e s I s t h e S a m e a s
F i n d i n g O n e C o r r e c t A n s w e r
C h o i c e
Think about it: A multiple-choice question on the SAT
has five answer choices. Only one answer choice is cor-
rect, which means the other four must be incorrect. You
can use this fact to your advantage. Sometimes it’s eas-
ier to figure out which answer choices are incorrect
than to figure out which answer choice is correct.
Here’s an exaggerated example:
What is 9,424 
2,962? 
a.
0
b.
10
c.
20
d.
100
e.
27,913,888
Even without doing any calculations, you still
know that answer choice 
e
is correct because answer
choices 
a
,
b
,
c
, and 
d
are obviously incorrect. Of course,
questions on the SAT will not be this easy, but you can
still apply this idea to every multiple-choice question on
the SAT. Let’s see how.
G e t R i d o f W r o n g A n s w e r
C h o i c e s a n d I n c r e a s e
Yo u r L u c k
Remember that multiple-choice questions on the SAT
contain distracters: incorrect answer choices designed
to distract you from the correct answer choice. Your job
is to get rid of as many of those distracters as you can
when answering a question. Even if you can get rid of
only one of the five answer choices in a question, you
have still increased your chances of answering the ques-
tion correctly.
Think of it this way: Each SAT question provides
five answer choices. If you guess blindly from the five
choices, your chances of choosing the correct answer
are 1 in 5, or 20%. If you get rid of one answer choice
before guessing because you determine that it is incor-
rect, your chances of choosing the correct answer are 1
in 4, or 25%, because you are choosing from only the
four remaining answer choices. If you get rid of two
incorrect answer choices before guessing, your chances
of choosing the correct answer are 1 in 3, or 33%. Get
rid of three incorrect answer choices, and your chances
are 1 in 2, or 50%. If you get rid of all four incorrect
answer choices, your chances of guessing the correct
answer choice are 1 in 1, or 100%! As you can see, each
answer choice you eliminate increases your chances of
guessing the correct answer.