Paragraph and Passage Organization | The Complete SAT Course - Class 10 PDF Download

Paragraph and passage organization questions test your understanding of rhetorical strategies on a large scale. Occasionally, they may also be paired with supporting evidence questions. To answer these questions correctly and quickly, you must be able to identify places where key ideas and arguments are introduced, as well as transition words that indicate the relationships between those ideas.
If a question asks about the organization of a paragraph, you should begin by skimming for important transitions within that paragraph. Then, consider the functions of those transitions (compare/contrast, indicate sequence of events, etc.) and what sorts of relationships between ideas they convey.
If a question asks about the overall organization of a passage, you should focus on the end of the introduction and the first sentence of each subsequent paragraph. While you should be able to recognize how paragraphs and passages are organized, you should not take the time to label each section of a passage as you read it.
If you are comfortable determining organization, you can most likely figure it out on the spot when necessary. As a preparation strategy, however, you may find it helpful to label the various parts of a passage (e.g., historical context, supporting example, counterargument, etc,).
You should also be on the lookout for changes in point of view, especially those involving first-person narrations (1), because this information can provide an important shortcut for both identifying correct answers and eliminating incorrect ones. hr some cases, you may also be able to simplify some questions by focusing on one part of an answer choice and checking it against the corresponding part of the passage. Starting on the next page, we're going to look at some examples.

The sharing economy is a little like online shopping, which started in America 15 years ago. At first, people were worried about security. But having made a successful purchase from, say, Amazon, they 5 felt safe buying elsewhere. Similarly, using Airbnb or a car-hire service for the first time encourages people to try other offerings. Next, consider eBay. Having started out as a peer-to-peer marketplace, it is now dominated by professional “power sellers” (many of whom started 10 out as ordinary eBay users). The same may happen with the sharing economy, which also provides new opportunities for enterprise. Some people have bought cars solely to rent them out, for example. Incumbents are getting involved too. Avis, a car-hire firm, has a share IS in a sharing rival. So do GM and Daimler, two carmakers. In the future, companies may develop hybrid models, listing excess capacity (whether vehicles, equipment or office space) on peer-to-peer rental sites. In the past, new ways of doing things online have not displaced the 20 old ways entirely. But they have often changed them. Just as internet shopping forced Walmart and Tesco to adapt, so online sharing will shake up transport, tourism, equipment-hire and more. The main worry is regulatory uncertainty. Will 25 room-4-renters be subject to hotel taxes, for example? In Amsterdam officials are using Airbnb listings to track down unlicensed hotels. In some American cities, peer-to-peer taxi services have been banned after lobbying by traditional taxi firms. The danger is that 30 although some rules need to be updated to protect consumers from harm, incumbents will try to destroy competition. People who rent out rooms should pay tax, of course, but they should not be regulated like a Ritz-Carlton hotel. The lighter rules that typically govern 35 bed-and-breakfasts are more than adequate. The sharing economy is the latest example of the internet’s value to consumers. This emerging model is now big and disruptive enough for regulators and companies to have woken up to it. That is a sign of its immense potential. It 40 is time to start caring about sharing.
Q. Which choice best describes the structure of the first paragraph (lines 1-23)? 
(A) A comparison is presented and developed through supporting examples.
(B) A principle is described, and an opposing principle is then introduced,
(C) The strengths and weaknesses of several competing explanations are discussed.
(D) A personal account of an experience is provided, followed by a reflection on that experience.

Before we start working carefully through the answers, we can eliminate D). A quick glance at the passage reveals that the word I does not appear anywhere, so the passage cannot be "personal." The next thing we want to do is simplify the question and the answers. The question asks about the entire first paragraph - that's 23 lines.

Remember, however, that a long line reference usually indicates that it is not necessary to reread the entire section carefully. So instead, we're going to focus on the beginning of the passage, say lines 1-7. The beginning of the correct answer must describe what's happening in those lines.

The sharing economy is a little like online shopping, which started in America 15 years ago. At first, people were worried about security. But having made a successful purchase from, say, Amazon, they 5 felt safe buying elsewhere. Similarly, using Airbnb or a car-hire service for the first time encourages people to try other offerings.
Q. Which choice best describes the structure of the first paragraph (lines 1-23)? 
(A) A comparison is presented and developed through supporting examples.
(B) A principle is described, and an opposing principle is then introduced.
(C) The strengths and weaknesses of several competing explanations are discussed.
(D) A personal account of an experience is provided, followed by a reflection on that experience.

What is happening at the beginning of the passage? Well, the first sentence presents a comparison, as indicated by tire phrase a little like. If we focus on just the start of each answer choice, we can see that A) is the only option that begins with the word comparison, suggesting that it is correct. When we read a little further, we can see that the following lures do in fact develop that comparison, as indicated by the transition similarly. A) is thus correct.

The answer choices could, however, be written in a manner less conducive to this type of shortcut. What if they were presented like this?
The sharing economy is a little like online shopping, which started in America 15 years ago. At first, people were worried about security. But having made a successful purchase from, say, Amazon, they 5 felt safe buying elsewhere. Similarly, using Airbnb or a car-hire service for the first time encourages people to try other offerings. Next, consider eBay. Having started out as a peer-to-peer marketplace, it is now dominated by professional “power sellers” (many of whom started 10 out as ordinary eBay users). The same may happen with the sharing economy, which also provides new opportunities for enterprise.
Q. Which choice best describes the structure of the first paragraph (lines 1-23)? 
(A) An assertion is presented, and supporting examples are provided.
(B) A principle is described, and an opposing principle is then introduced.
(C) The strengths and weaknesses of several competing explanations are discussed.
(D) A personal account of an experience is presented, followed by a reflection on that experience.

Although we can no longer use the word "comparison" in A) as a shortcut we can still get important information by focusing on pronouns and transitions. The word I does not appear, so D) can be eliminated right away. An "opposing principle" or "competing explanations" would almost certainly be signed by contradiction such as but or however, but no such transitions appear here, eliminating B). Again, that leaves A), hr addition to expressing a comparison, the first sentence also conveys an argument, i.e., an assertion. And when we look at the transitions, we can see that they are mostly continuous that introduce information supporting that assertion.

For six decades, observers have been confounded by the movement of large rocks across a dry lake bed in California’s Death Valley National Park. Leaving fiat trails behind them, rocks that weigh up to 100 5 pounds seemingly do Michael Jackson’s moomvalk across the valley’s sere, cracked sutface, sometimes traveling more than 100 yards. Without a body of water to pick them up and move them, the rocks at Racetrack Playa, a flat space between the valley’s high cliffs, 10 have been the subject of much speculation, including whether they have been relocated by human pranksters or space aliens. The rocks have become the desert equivalent of Midwestern crop circles.
“They really are a curiosity,” says Ralph Lorenz, a planetary scientist at 15 the Applied Physics Laboratory. “Some [people] have mentioned UFOs. But I’ve always believed that this is something science could solve.” It has tried. One theory holds that the rocks are blown along by powerful winds. Another posits that 20 the wind pushes thin sheets of ice, created when the desert’s temperatures dip low enough to freeze water from a rare rainstorm, and the rocks go along for the ride.
But neither theory is rock solid. Winds at the playa aren’t strong enough—some scientists believe that 25 they’d have to be 100 miles per hour or more—to blow the rocks across the valley. And rocks subject to the “ice sailing theory” wouldn’t create trails as they moved. Lorenz and a team of investigators believe that a 30 combination of forces may work to rearrange Racetrack Playa’s rocks. “We saw that it would take a lot of wind to move these rocks, which are larger than you’d expect wind to move,” Lorenz explains. “That led us to this idea that ice might be picking up the 35 rocks and floating them.”
As they explained in the January issue of The American Journal of Physics, instead of moving along with wind-driven sheets of ice, the rocks may instead be lifted by the ice, making them more subject to the wind’s force. The key, Lorenz 40 says, is that the lifting by an “ice collar” reduces friction with the ground, to the point that the wind now has enough force to move the rock, The rock moves, the ice doesn’t, and because part of the rock juts through the ice, it marks the territory it has covered. 45 Lorenz’s team came to its conclusion through a combination of intuition, lab work, and observation— not that the last part was easy.
Watching the rocks travel is a bit like witnessing the rusting of a hubcap. Instances of movement are rare and last for only a few 50 seconds. Lorenz’s team placed low-resolution cameras on the cliffs (which are about 30 miles from the nearest paved road) to take pictures once per hour. For the past three winters, the researchers have weathered extreme temperatures and several flat tires to measure how 55 often the thermometer dips below freezing, how often the play a gets rain and floods, and the strength of the winds.
“The measurements seem to back up our hypothesis,” he says. “Any of the theories may be true at any one time, but ice rafting may be the best explan-50 ation for the trails we’ve been seeing. We’ve seen trails like this documented in Arctic coastal areas, and the mechanism is somewhat similar. A belt of ice surrounds a boulder during high tide, picks it up, and then drops it elsewhere.” His “ice raft theory” was also 65 borne out by an experiment that used the ingenuity of a high school science fair.
Lorenz placed a basalt pebble in a Tupperware container with water so that the pebble projected just above the surface. He then turned the container upside down in a baking tray filled with a 70 layer of coarse sand at its base, and put the whole thing in his home freezer. The rock’s “keel” (its protruding part) projected downward into the sand, which simulated the cracked surface of the playa (which scientists call “Special K” because of its resemblance to cereal 75 flakes). A gentle push or slight puff of air caused the Tupperware container to move, just as an ice raft would under the right conditions.
The pebble made a trail in the soft sand. “It was primitive but effective,” Lorenz says of the experiment. Lorenz has spent the 80 last 20 years studying Titan, a moon of Saturn. He says that Racetrack Piaya’s surface mirrors that of a dried lakebed on Titan. Observations and experiments on Earth may yield clues to that moon’s geology. “We also may get some idea of how climate affects 85 geology—particularly as the climate changes here on Earth,” Lorenz says.
“When we study other planets and their moons, we’re forced to use Occam’s razor -sometimes the simplest answer is best, which means you look to Earth for some answers. Once you get out 90 there on Earth, you realize how strange so much of its surface is. So, you have to figure there’s weird stuff to be found on Titan as well.” Whether that’s true or not will take much more investigation. He adds: “One day, we’ll figure all this out. For the moment, the moving 95 rock present a wonderful problem to study in a beautiful place.”
Q. Which choice best describes the structure of this passage? 
(A) A theory is presented, and evidence to refute it is provided.
(B) A mystery is described, explanations are considered, and a synthesis is proposed.
(C) A hypothesis is introduced, and its strengths and weaknesses are analyzed.
(D) A new technology is described, its application is discussed, and its implications are considered.

It's understandable that you might get a little nervous (or more than a little nervous) about having to boil 96 lines worth of information down into a single statement, but here again, you can actually answer the question using only the first sentence.
What do we learn from it? That observers have been confounded (utterly baffled) by tire movement of the Racetrack Play a rocks - in other words, there's a mystery going on. Based on that piece of information alone, you can identify B) as the answer most likely to be correct.
If you want to check tire answer further, you can focus on the beginnings of subsequent paragraphs. The words One theory and another [theory] at the beginning of the second paragraph correspond to "explanations," and the phrase a combination of forces corresponds to "synthesis." So B) is correct.