The Princeton Review - Princeton Review PSAT 8_9 Prep-Random House Children's Books (2021)

Notice that it’s not asking you WHAT the sentence says. It is asking
about the sentence’s purpose. The purpose for something is the
reason it is there. How would you talk about that? You would explain
WHY it is there, right? Yes! So when you see questions with phrases
like “what is the purpose” or “in order to,” just translate them into
questions starting with WHY.
Question 38 is really asking WHY the author included the sentence
in lines 28–30. Doesn’t that feel easier to deal with than the way it
was originally worded? We think so too.
Think for a moment about how authors make and support their
points: they give details or examples to help convey a certain theme
or to provide evidence for a claim. When the College Board asks why
the author includes certain words, sentences, or paragraphs, you
have to look for the larger idea the author is supporting with a
particular detail. You won’t have to guess the author’s purpose—
there will be evidence in the passage of the point the author is
making. You do need to read a window around the line reference in
order to identify the author’s point. In other words, the Basic
Approach for a WHY question is similar to the approach for a WHAT
question, but the prediction will be based on how the detail in the
question relates to the surrounding text.
To work question 38, begin by carefully reading a window around the
line reference. Lines 21–25 describe the results of an experiment: 15
minutes after participants listened to their favorite song, their
brains flooded with dopamine. The sentence that question 38 asks
about is a quote by Salimpoor about the experiment’s results. She
says, “But animals don’t get intense pleasures to music…So we knew
there had to be a lot more to it.” The next paragraph describes a new
experiment that Salimpoor and her team conducted to learn more
about the brain activity that occurs when people listen to music.
Remember, the question asks WHY the author includes the
information in lines 28–30. In lines 28–30, Salimpoor indicates that