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SAT: How Text 2 Responds to Text 1

Paired passage questions give you two short texts and ask how the second author would likely respond to a point in the first. The relationship is rarely total agreement or total rejection. It is usually a partial response: accepting one part, disputing another, or reframing the same evidence.

The rule

Write each author's specific claim in one sentence, then describe the relationship between those two claims before reading the choices.

Summarize each text in one sentence before you look at the question. Write down what Text 1 claims and what Text 2 claims, in your own words. Nearly all of the difficulty in these questions comes from students holding a vague sense of both passages instead of a specific claim from each.

Then find the exact point the question names. The question usually quotes or paraphrases a specific statement from Text 1, and you should respond only to that statement, not to Text 1 as a whole. An author might agree with the overall project of Text 1 while disputing the particular claim being asked about.

Predict the relationship in plain language. Something like the second author would say the effect is real but caused by something else is a perfectly good prediction. Then look for the choice that says that. Naming the relationship first keeps you from being pulled toward a choice that sounds like a smart thing to say about the two texts generally.

Be careful with choices that assign a stronger position than the text supports. A common wrong answer has the second author flatly rejecting a claim when the second text only raised a limitation. Another has the second author agreeing completely when the second text offered a different explanation. Match degree as well as direction.

Also check the subject of the response. Two texts often address overlapping but distinct questions, such as whether a practice was common versus whether it was effective. A choice where the second author responds to a question the second text never addressed is wrong regardless of how reasonable it sounds.

The trap

Treating a partial disagreement as a total rejection, which overstates what the second author actually said.

Try it

Try one
Real question

Text 1: Literary critic Gerald Ashworth praises the 1930s novels of Winifred Slade for their refusal of plot. Nothing happens in them, he writes, and that is their achievement: they render ordinary duration without the distortion that incident imposes. Ashworth made the case in a 1951 essay that set Slade against the plot-driven realism of her contemporaries, and later critics largely repeated it. Text 2: Critic Nadira Bose reads the same novels closely, tabulating every reported action sentence by sentence, and counts, in one of them, a death, a bankruptcy, and a departure. What is unusual, she argues, is not the absence of events but their placement: each is reported in a subordinate clause while the main clause describes weather or a meal. The effect, she concludes, is produced by grammar rather than by what Slade chose to leave out.

Based on the texts, how would Bose most likely respond to Ashworth's description of Slade's novels?

Text 1 Historian Perpetua Ashworth argues that enclosing open fields raised English agricultural output. Parishes enclosed before 1780 record higher yields per acre in the following decades than parishes that remained open, and enclosure allowed a single owner to drain and re-sow without agreement from neighbors. She calls enclosure the engine of the agricultural revolution. Text 2 Historian Ikechukwu Braun does not dispute the yield figures. He observes that the parishes enclosed earliest were those with heavy clay soils, where drainage had the most to offer, and that enclosure of light upland soils after 1800 produced no yield advantage at all. Enclosure removed an obstacle. Whether removing it mattered depended on what the ground could do once it was removed. The same act had different effects on different ground.

Based on the texts, how would Braun most likely respond to the argument presented in Text 1?

  • A) By disputing the yield figures Ashworth cites for the English parishes that were enclosed before 1780.
  • B) By arguing that upland parishes would have raised their yields if they had been enclosed before 1780.
  • C) By concluding that enclosure made no difference to English agricultural output in any period at all.
  • D) By agreeing that enclosure raised yields on some soils while denying that it did so on others. ✓

Why: Braun accepts the figures and ties the benefit to soil: clay parishes gained from drainage, while enclosure of "light upland soils after 1800 produced no yield advantage at all." Choice A rejects evidence he grants. Choice C denies an effect he concedes on clay. Choice B treats the early date as the operative factor, when his point is that early enclosure marks heavy soil. By disputing the yield figures Ashworth cites for the English parishes that were enclosed before 1780. is wrong because he "does not dispute the yield figures". By concluding that enclosure made no difference to English agricultural output in any period at all. is wrong because he says enclosure "removed an obstacle," which mattered on clay. By arguing that upland parishes would have raised their yields if they had been enclosed before 1780. reverses his point; timing is a proxy for soil, not the cause.

Practice more of these free

Questions students ask

Do the two texts always disagree?

No. They may agree on the finding and differ on its cause, agree on the cause and differ on its importance, or extend each other without conflict. Assuming disagreement is one of the fastest ways to pick a wrong answer on these questions.

Should I read both texts fully before the question?

Read the question first so you know which specific claim is at issue, then read both texts with that focus. The texts are short, and knowing the target lets you pay extra attention to the sentences that actually decide the answer.

Guides that cover this

More on cross-text connections