Part II
In this part...
Now it’s time to get down to cases. Are you ready to look at some actual questions? Don’t be scared — this part tells you how to answer them. By staring those challenging questions right in the face now, you can begin to get into the mindset of the evil Test Mongers who are, even as you read this, probably cackling about what they have in store for you. This part arms you with a strategy for taking on whatever the Test Mongers throw your way. By looking at the three parts of the exam out front, you can be thinking about possible questions and answers as you review history. No surprises; you’ll be locked, loaded, and ready for action.
Chapter 4
In This Chapter
● Getting a handle on multiple-choice tricks
● Taking a good look at illustrations
● Nailing down your timing
It’s funny, isn’t it? Fifty-five minutes seems really long when you have to get through a whole period of that class you hate in school. But in the AP U.S. History exam, when you’re faced with 80 multiple-choice questions, each with 5 possible answers lettered from A to E, those same 55 minutes don’t even seem to be enough time for you to say hello.
Well, hello! Whether 55 minutes seems like enough time to you for 80 multiple-choice questions, in this chapter, I give you plenty of pointers and strategies to help you stretch the time to fit your winning answers.
Scoping Out the Multiple-Choice Question Troll
If you look at the big AP test as payday for all the studying you’ve done, Section I is where you can score some easy bucks. In only a third of the test time, you can earn half of the credits just by confronting your old friend and enemy, multiple choice. Your trick is to avoid turning multiple choice into multiple guess.
You’re going to be getting a great grade on multiple-choice Section I because you’ll be keeping your eye on the basics. Don’t waste your time on hard questions. When you’re in class, the teacher may think you’re super smart because you remember the year the Farmer-Labor Party was founded (1918). Face facts: The big exam doesn’t issue brownie points. You get the same credit for answering hard questions as easy ones. Get all the easy answers before you bang your head on the hard ones.
Think of each multiple-choice question as a tricky little troll holding a shiny piece of treasure: one point worth of credit toward that great score you’re going to rack up on the AP. But wait — not so fast! Mr. Troll doesn’t want to give up the treasure — and he can bite. Before you reach in to grab the credit, scrutinize that tricky little troll carefully. Check the Question Troll out with all the scopes: Use a periscope, a microscope, and even a telescope on each question before you answer it. In this section, I show you how.
If you get stressed during your run through the multiple-choice warehouse, do a couple of the deep-breathing exercises outlined in Chapter 3. Breathe in deeply through your nose in four sections. Breathe out completely through your mouth. Don’t overdo it, and keep your eye on the test. You’re going for a good score, not spiritual enlightenment.
Looking out for hidden points
The Question Trolls like to hide their treasure points in the most important spots. The AP folks want you to know the key trends in U.S. history, not a bunch of board game trivia. You don’t have to remember battles or the name of every explorer who ever leaned on a tree. The right answer is often the broadest, most important concept.
What was the most important impact of the Great Depression of the 1930s on the United States?
(A) It led to Prohibition.
(B) Lots of Americans were depressed.
(C) Businesses did better with less competition.
(D) The Great Depression led to an expansion of the role of government and social programs to protect people from poverty.
(E) The United States got off the gold standard to make more money.
Even though some of the other answers contain a little bit of truth, the only one that can be the key concept is expansion of the role of government and social programs, choice (D). The key concepts to study for the AP are right there in extra-black type: They’re the section headings in this book and your textbook.
Beware of tricky Question Trolls! Some answer choices are attractive bait to lure you into a quick wrong decision. You’re too smart to be fooled into saying, for the question about the Great Depression, that it meant lots of Americans were depressed, but that answer could sound like a fit to the uninformed. Watch out for answers that sound a little too simplistic; they’re there to trap the simple.
Taking a closer look at the points penalty
How come the nice College Board lets the Question Troll bite you when you reach in for one of his treasure points the wrong way? Test makers are the kind of people who worked hard to make good grades all the way through school. They hate the kind of people who party down instead of studying and then, on the day of the test, somehow get lucky and blow right through the exam with a good grade they didn't earn.
Here's an example: Mr. Party slouches back in his chair, picks up the Scantron answer sheet, and just makes a nice pattern of filled-in ovals without even bothering to read the questions (which may as well be in Greek, for the amount of time he's studied). For each question, he has a one-in-five possibility of being right purely by chance. Therefore, with average luck, out of 80 questions, just blind chance should get him one fifth of 80, or 16 points, on the multiple-choice section. That score isn't enough for Harvard to call with a scholarship, but it's 16 points more than Mr. Party deserves.
With the Question Troll taking a well-deserved nip out of his score, our bad actor gets one quarter of a point taken away for each wrong guess. Because his average luck on pattern marking left him guessing wrong 64 times, he loses one quarter of 64 points for a score of 16 lucky points minus 16 penalty, or 0 points total — exactly what he deserves for knowing nothing about history.
You deserve better, of course, because you've studied. You may not know everything about U.S. history, but at least you know some things.
Paying close attention to the scoring
Each right answer you snatch from a Question Troll is worth one point. If you get bitten by picking a wrong answer, the troll takes away one-quarter point. Section I of the AP test has 80 multiple-choice questions. Suppose you answer 60 of them correctly, pick the wrong answer 12 times, and leave 8 question spaces blank because the Question Troll for those last 8 questions looks too mean to mess with. You’d get 60 points for your correct answers and lose 3 points for the ones you missed ( 1/4 of 12 points is 3 points), for a total of 57 points. Not bad. If you had taken a shot at the last 8 toughie troll questions and missed every time, you’d lose one quarter of 8 points; you’d end up losing another 2 points, for a final score of 55 points. You get a lot if you’re right, but being wrong costs a little.
Suppose that you’re confronted by this tricky troll question:
Which treaty did away with most of the trade restrictions among the United States, Canada, and Mexico?
(A) SALT
(B) NBA
(C) The Gulf of Tonkin resolution
(D) SDI
(E) NAFTA
Oh, my gosh! It’s alphabet soup. Your mind goes blank. Then a small light begins to shine: Isn’t the NBA that league with balls, hoops, tall guys, and 3-point plays? Okay, you don’t play basketball with trade restrictions, so choice (B) is wrong.
If you can eliminate only that one wrong answer, you’ve evened the odds: You have one chance in four of guessing correctly on the remaining four choices by pure chance and three chances in four of losing a quarter of a point. Guess this way 80 times, and you’ll theoretically be 8 points ahead: 80 questions with one out of four average luck equals 20 questions right. Take away one quarter of 60 questions wrong, and you lose 12. You pick up 8 points on average just by eliminating one bad response.
The odds get better if you can eliminate two bad multiple-choice answers. With random chance, you pick up an average of 14 points on 80 questions if you can narrow each question down to three choices. Suppose that in addition to tossing the NBA off the court, you have a strong suspicion that the Gulf of Tonkin is a long way from the United States, Canada, or Mexico. And you may just sneak up on the right answer directly. Don’t these three nations make up North America? With that information to go on, you may conjure up the North American Free Trade Agreement — also known as NAFTA — from the misty outlands of your mind.
The take-out lesson is this: If you can eliminate even one of the five multiple choices, guessing pays. If you really haven’t got a clue, don’t touch the troll unless you feel lucky. Your odds of doing damage are as good as your odds of scoring points.
Fortunately for your chances with the Question Troll, you have more than one way to get a clue.
Periscope up: Watching out for tricky Words
Because trolls are tricky, make sure that you read each question carefully, twice, before you grab one of the five answer choices. In sports, juking is when you fake out an opponent by dodging in the opposite direction from where he thinks you’re going. Question Trolls love to juke you. If you don’t study their moves carefully from a safe distance (as though you were looking through a periscope) before you move in to grab an answer choice, you may well find yourself headed in the wrong direction.
Questions meant to juke you typically contain the words EXCEPT, NOT, or LEAST. Notice that these words are in capital letters. They’re printed this way to give you a fighting chance to see them even if you’re in a hurry. This convention also allows the trolls to laugh righteously if you miss something that’s right there in plain sight, capitalized. Juking words change the direction of the question.
Gracefully dodging the EXCEPT juke
Take a close look at the following sample question:
All these important foods came to Europe from discoveries in the New World EXCEPT
(A) chocolate
(B) corn
(C) tomatoes
(D) coffee
(E) potatoes
So you’re blowing by at the rate of a question every 40 seconds; you see the terms foods, Europe, and New World, and you think, “Oh, boy. I know — it’s got to be tomatoes, because how did the Italians make pizza without tomatoes before they discovered the New World?”
Or you think, “It’s chocolate for sure, because I remember wondering how Europeans even bothered to keep living in a pre-New World era without chocolate.”
This question has too many good answers — and that’s the tip-off that you’re the target of an attempted juke. Perhaps you were going so fast that you didn’t see the word EXCEPT, even though it’s in brazen capital letters. Even if you miss EXCEPT, all is not lost. If you read all the choices and don’t just swallow the first bait that the troll tosses your way, you’ll begin to notice that a lot of the answers seem to fit a little too well. Suspiciously, all but one of the answers look like they could work. Look back at the question, and you find the juke in all caps.
Read the whole question and all the answers. Twice.
NOT is not to be ignored!
In addition to the EXCEPT trolls, you need to watch out for questions with NOT in them.
Which of the following was NOT included in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787?
(A) procedures for organizing territory and state governments
(B) a ban on slavery
(C) guaranteed religious freedom
(D) the right to a jury trial
(E) specific reservations for American Indians
Like the EXCEPT troll, the NOT bomb is hoping you’re reading too fast to notice it lurking there as inconspicuously as any word can that’s forced to wear capital letters. The NOT bomb is banking on your seeing just the phrase “Northwest Ordinance of 1787,” glancing down at the answers, seeing one of the attractive first four answers (A) through (D), and patting yourself on the back as you rush your wrong answer to the Scantron sheet.
But you’re too smart for the NOT bomb. You’ve read the question twice, so you’ve definitely seen the giant NOT. You’ve also read the possible answers twice, and they mostly look too good to be true. You’ve saved yourself from disaster by careful reading. But how do you know which of the five answers is the right one? Here are some things to consider:
● You know the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was written by the same lovable guys who brought you the American Revolution. Therefore, it should contain Declaration of Independence issues such as jury trials.
● Setting up state governments is a noncontroversial housekeeping matter; it had to be there.
● Slavery certainly was controversial, but — clue — you know the Northwest ended up without slaves.
● Perhaps the least-noble reason for the Revolution was to let the new Americans have at American Indian lands the British government had declared off limits. It wouldn’t make sense to set aside specific reservations when the American Indians were still fighting to have no settlers at all.
● The most extreme answer is (E). Take it to the bank.
When you scan a list of possible answers, especially in juke questions, look for the most extreme outlier to be the answer you want. The most extreme choices tend to be extremely right when it comes to answering negatively phrased juke questions. They go beyond the list presented and just don’t quite fit in.
Last but not LEAST
The final juke word to look out for is LEAST. You’re sailing along normally, looking for the best match between the key word in the question and those tricky multiple choices when you come upon a LEAST. Big pause. LEAST switches up the meaning, so now you’re looking for the worst match. But LEAST is even trickier than that. The answer can’t be wrong, and it can’t be from outer space; it just has to be the worst fit. Check out this example.
Which of the following was the LEAST important reason Andrew Jackson was popular with American voters in the 1820s and 1830s?
(A) opposed the Bank of the United States
(B) stood up to nullification
(C) dressed like a frontiersman
(D) supported more democracy for the common man
(E) won the Battle of New Orleans
You don’t have to worry about one of these answers being false. Because this is a LEAST question, they’re all at least partly true. Dressing like a frontiersman seems to be pretty trivial, even in a symbolic field like politics. The 1820s and 1830s had no TV and few pictures anyway, so not many people could have seen Jackson. Choice (C), dressed like a frontiersman, is the LEAST reason and your best answer.
Conquering bossy words
In addition to EXCEPT, NOT, and LEAST, watch out for bossy words like complete, always, never, only, all, every, and none. Because history almost always has exceptions, bossy words
that seem to cover the whole story are often the sign of a wrong answer. Take a look at the following example:
Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 because
(A) the only reason he wanted to win the Civil War was to abolish slavery
(B) Lincoln always sided with the abolitionists
(C) the Emancipation Proclamation completely freed the slaves
(D) emancipation made political and moral sense in 1863
(E) Lincoln never made a political decision when he could make a moral one
The bossy words in (A), (B), (C), and (E) mark them for extinction from your answer choices. Lincoln said he wanted to preserve the Union, whether it meant freeing all the slaves or freeing none of the slaves. Although Lincoln certainly was personally opposed to slavery, he put being President of a united America before the cause of abolition. The Emancipation Proclamation freed only slaves in rebel states. Lincoln was a great and honest person, but he wouldn’t have won the Presidential election if he weren’t also an experienced politician.
Reverse engines! Bossy words are your friends when a troll tries to juke you with one of those tricky EXCEPT, NOT, or LEAST questions. Here’s a different take on the Emancipation Proclamation question:
Which of the following causes is NOT a part of the reason Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves in the Emancipation Proclamation?
(A) The North had better news from the battlefield.
(B) Lincoln always sided with the abolitionists.
(C) Freeing the slaves had popular support in the North.
(D) Lincoln was personally opposed to slavery.
(E) Fleeing slaves may weaken Southern war efforts.
In this version, the very word always that made choice (B) wrong in the first question makes it right in the juke NOT question.
Going with what you know
You’re smarter than you think. You can usually come up with more than one way to figure out a question. When you hit a blank wall, try thinking outside the wall. Eliminating even one bad answer choice puts the odds in your favor. Sometimes, you can rule out answers by looking at them closely, like through a microscope. Here’s an example:
Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle led to the passage of which law?
(A) the Clayton Antitrust Law
(B) the Northwest Ordinance
(C) the Pure Food and Drug Act
(D) the Stark Amendment
(E) the Hepburn Act
Oh, my gosh, how would you know? All those boring acts look like foreign arithmetic to you. Ah, but wait. On a slow Friday in literature class, the teacher was talking about The Jungle not being all about vines and monkeys and stuff, but about filthy food factories. That would lead you to (C), the Pure Food and Drug Act. Or you may just have been wrestling with the question about the Northwest Ordinance covered earlier in this chapter, and you picked up something about the ordinance from answering that question.
When it comes to defending yourself from the biting Question Trolls, don’t get caught with no facts to go on. Although it’s good to be thinky, it’s even better to be knowy. When you study history, take note of the key terms, their approximate dates, and why they’re important. You may make this note: “Northwest Ordinance (1787 — at the beginning of U.S. government) = rules for setting up new states from the Ohio River to the Mississippi River; no slavery; freedom of religion; jury trials.”
Making a (itt(e knowledge go a tong Way
You don’t really need to know something by heart to choose the correct answer. Sometimes, you can make a little knowledge go a long way.
American artists painting around 1900 in what was called the Realist school tended to paint which subject?
(A) American frontier life
(B) urban scenes
(C) rural family life
(D) wild natural landscapes
(E) pastoral scenes
The answer is (B). A little time with art can go a long way. You have a vague feeling that the late Victorians painted some pretty sentimental scenes, certainly not what you’d call Realism. Then-common subjects like (A), (C), (D), and (E) probably wouldn’t earn a special name like Realist school; they all blend together and make (B) stand out.
Using common sense
Sometimes, common sense alone can help you solve a problem.
When a U.S. reporter coined the phrase Manifest Destiny, he meant that
(A) the struggle for racial equality should be the purpose of America
(B) the United States should set all of South America free from colonialism
(C) America must become either all slaveholding or all free
(D) it’s the fate of the United States to cover the whole continent from ocean to ocean
(E) all Americans should pursue happiness until they’re happy all the time
Okay, your best bet is to know that Manifest Destiny means (D). But what if you just knew that Manifest Destiny sounded like something you’d heard a lot? That would probably eliminate events that didn’t happen, such as (B) and (C). You can eliminate (E) because it sounds like a smart-aleck answer. You may know that Manifest Destiny started way before the Civil War and that even 100 years after the outbreak of the Civil War, racial equality still didn’t have full support. That pretty much leaves (A) out. Knowing a little and taking the time to use your common sense can be a lifesaver.
Part II: Answering the Questions: Three Kinds, Three Strategies
Making historic eras your friend
By knowing the approximate year of a key term, you give yourself power to pry the point from a Question Troll.
All the following were results of the First Great Awakening EXCEPT
(A) more and stronger churches
(B) the founding of new colleges and universities
(C) nationwide religious enthusiasm
(D) a return to the persecution of witches
(E) ministers with followings of thousands
The answer is (D). The First Great Awakening wasn’t about a return to the persecution of witches. You could have scored on this question from several directions. First, the minute you see the word EXCEPT, LEAST, or NOT, you say to yourself, “juke.” You’re looking for an extreme that just doesn’t fit with the rest of the answers.
If you don’t know all about the First Great Awakening yet, don’t worry — I get to that in Part III. Even if this were test day, and you still didn’t really know, you could work with whatever dates you do have in your brain. You may know that the witch hunt thing died out in the 1690s and that the First Great Awakening didn’t occur until 40 years later. You may realize that history is written by the winners and that they’d be unlikely to give the name Awakening to something as ugly as burning women. You may just figure out that persecution of witches is a standout in a list with unifying words like churches, colleges, enthusiasm, and ministers.
You know you’re better off guessing if you can eliminate one of the choices. Because (A), (C), and (E) all sound like they belong to the same club, you can eliminate them from being the extreme. You’d be statistically way ahead even if you had to guess between (B) and (D).
Questioning illustrations
As though they just can’t wait for the Document-Based Question later on the test, the Question Trolls usually throw in few questions illustrated with pictures or charts. These illustrated questions can actually be easier than regular multiple-choice challenges. The illustration contains most of the answer; you just need to know what it’s telling you.
What does the following chart, which conveys the median personal income by educational attainment, illustrate about income and education?
Measure
|
Some High School |
High- School Graduate |
Some College |
Associate Degree |
Bachelor’s Degree |
Bachelor’s Degree or Higher |
Master’s Degree |
Professional Degree |
Doctorate Degree |
|
Persons age 25+ w/earnings |
||||||||
|
$20,321 |
$26,505 |
$31,054 |
$35,009 |
$43,143 |
$49,303 |
$52,390 |
$82,473 |
$70,853 |
(A) It’s always better to stay in school.
(B) Many people older than 25 are rich.
(C) Everybody with a bachelor’s degree makes at least $43,143.
(D) Income tends to rise with education.
(E) These figures are the minimum salaries for each education level.
The answer is right on the page: (D), income tends to rise with education. The important point with illustrated questions is to look hard at the picture and stick to what the illustration shows. Don’t think too hard and outsmart yourself by overinterpreting. The chart shows median personal income, not a guarantee. Median is different from the average that most people earn. That’s why the income advantage in this chart for a college degree is even better than the bucks dangled before your greedy eyes in Chapter 1. Keep studying!
Sometimes, the test will ask you to identify a picture’s background information; check out this example:
What are the era and social orientation of this cartoon?
(A) Southern Confederates
(B) Northern Democrats
(C) Slave owners, before the Civil War
(D) Northern abolitionists
(E) Reconstruction education, post-Civil War
The heart-rending subject indicates that the orientation is Northern, with strong abolitionist sentiments.
Beating the Clock for a Good Score
Time management is a key to winning on the multiple-choice section of the test. Even though you have only 55 minutes, you have all the time you need to pull out the easy questions and have a good shot at the harder issues. In the following sections, I give you tips to help you get through the multiple-choice section quickly without sacrificing accuracy.
Because the minutes make a difference, bring your own watch to the exam. You won’t be allowed to check your cell phone or PDA, and the clock in the exam room may be wrong. Having a watch lets you be your own time manager.
Why timing is golden
The multiple-choice section is like a run through a warehouse in which you get to keep everything good you can find in 55 minutes. Trouble is, if you get too hung up trying to grab cartons of gelatin, you may not get to the jewelry section. Section I moves in general from easier to harder questions, but toward the difficult end, you may find questions that you know by heart. That’s why you need to swing past all the questions quickly, like looking for your friends in a crowd by panning with a telescope.
Don’t get hung up arguing with your brain. Try to scan all the questions, and then go back and work on the issues that need a little more thinking. If ten more seconds of thinking don’t solve the problem, move on. Hitting the side of your head with your palm won’t loosen up the secret knowledge cave. Give quick insights a chance to arrive, but spread your attention over as many questions as possible.
Relax. Forty seconds is longer than you think. Look at a clock with a second hand. Watch that second hand twitch around the dial for 40 seconds. Boring, huh? That’s the interminable time you’ll have for each question. Remember, you have a lightning-fast brain. Just think of how fast your mind can move from school to that hot kid you see when you’re changing classes. Now stop thinking dirty and get back to the AP.
Pacing yourself to win
As you know only too well, the AP exam has 80 multiple-choice questions. When you get your Scantron form, make a light mark next to the answer ovals for question 20. Make another light mark next to the answer zone for question 40. The first mark will put you one quarter of the way through the multiple-choice race. You have 55 minutes total for the 80 questions. If you’re running on time, you should be at question 20 about 14 minutes out of the gate. When the testing starts, add 14 minutes to the time on your watch. When you get to question 20, check to see whether you’re on pace. Check once more when you get to question 40. If you’ve used more than half an hour of your 55 precious minutes, you need to pick up the pace. If you’ve used only about 20 minutes when you hit question 40, you can afford to take a little more time.
Using a marking trick for faster progress
When grades are on the line, smart people write and mark while they read. You, my friend, are a smart person, so you should mark in the question book as you roll rapidly (but in a controlled fashion) through the multiple-choice questions in Section I of the AP exam. Here are some pointers to follow to make the process faster and easier for you:
● If you’re sure that you’re locked into the right answer after reading both the question and all the answers twice, just circle that for-sure answer in the question book, and carefully blacken its oval on the Scantron answer form.
● If you can eliminate some but not all of the choices, cross out the answers you know are wrong.
● If you have one or more wrong answers crossed out, mark your best guess for the answer on the Scantron sheet, circle it on the question sheet, and put the number of wrong choices you’ve been able to cross out next to the question. If you’ve crossed out three wrong answers, put a 3 next to the question; if you’ve crossed out two wrong answers, put a 2 next to the question.
● If you don’t have a clue to eliminate any of the choices, put a zero next to the question and don’t fill in the Scantron sheet for that question. Also, put a light mark opposite the Scantron number of the question you’re not answering so that you don’t accidentally put the answer to a known question in the wrong place. Putting the right answer in the wrong row can screw up every answer that comes after it. Make sure you have completely erased all these light marks before you hand in the answers; extra marks can make the grading machine get funky and reject your good answers.
When you’ve made it through all the questions, you should still have time to go back to the beginning and take another look at the questions you’ve numbered. Go through all the 3s first, because these are the questions you’re closest to being sure about. When you’re through with the 3s, go back and do the 2s. If you have time, give a last once-over to the 1s and zeros. Do you feel lucky?
Don’t linger on any question after you’ve marked it. Instead, pause just long enough to see whether you want to change the answer you marked. Also, go with your first hunch unless you actually have a reason to change. Research shows that if you can’t come up with any additional information, your first hunch is usually the best bet.
Getting all the way to the end quickly, using the numbering tips I give you, has a time-sequence-wrong-answer-elimination advantage. You’ll actually pick up some history just from the juxtaposition of topics on the exam. You may be able to eliminate some wrong answers from early questions based on what you’ve noticed on questions closer to the end of the test. Also, answering later questions helps jog your memory.