Cross-text connections

These questions always give you two texts on the same narrow topic, written by two different people. The trap is reading them as if they’re just two facts to remember, rather than two claims that stand in some specific relationship to each other. Before looking at the answer choices, restate each author’s main point in a single plain sentence. Once you have both sentences side by side, the actual relationship — agreement, flat contradiction, or a more precise middle ground — usually becomes obvious.

That middle ground is the case the SAT tests most. It’s rare for Text 2 to simply say “Text 1 is wrong.” Far more often, Text 2 accepts Text 1’s evidence but disputes the conclusion drawn from it, or adds a detail that complicates the picture without erasing it. Answer choices that describe flat agreement or flat contradiction are usually there to catch readers who skimmed past that nuance.

Some questions ask you to predict how one author would respond to a specific claim from the other’s text, rather than describe the general relationship between the two. Answer those by finding the sentence in the second text that most directly addresses that specific claim — not just any sentence that sounds like disagreement.

Question 1 of 8easy

Text 1 (Dr. Alvarez): "In a series of controlled experiments, participants who played fast-paced action video games for ten hours showed measurably faster visual reaction times and improved ability to track multiple moving objects at once, compared to a control group that played slower-paced games. These results suggest that action games train general-purpose attention skills that could benefit tasks far beyond gaming itself." Text 2 (Dr. Okafor): "Laboratory reaction-time gains after a few hours of gameplay are well documented, but they rarely predict performance on tasks outside the lab. Studies that track students' grades or job performance after video game training have found little to no measurable benefit, suggesting that whatever skill improves is narrowly tied to the specific game tested rather than transferring broadly." Based on the texts, how would Dr. Okafor most likely respond to Dr. Alvarez's claim that action games "train general-purpose attention skills"?