[Video] Q42: The main purpose of the passage is to

Explanation for Question 42 From the Reading Section on the Official Sat Practice Test 4

Question 42 asks what the main purpose of this passage is. 2 So let's look at the first paragraph, 3 the introductory paragraph and see what information that that paragraph is introducing. 4 So it's pretty short. It says about 750 years ago, 5 a powerful volcano erupted somewhere on earth, 6 king off centuries, long, cold snap known as the little ice age, 7 identifying the volcano responsible has been tricky. 8 So this pretty much sums up this passage. 9 Well, it introduces the idea of the little ice age, 10 which they go into detail in, 11 in the next two paragraphs. And then talking about identifying the volcano responsible 12 in the following paragraphs. 13 So we can infer from this first introduction that 14 this passage is going to be one about the properties of that little ice 15 age and two, about how scientists have worked to identify the volcano 16 responsible and why that's been tricky. 17 So if we look at the answer choices, 18 a says to describe periods in earth, re in Earth's recent geological history. 19 So this answer choice is going to be incorrect for a few reasons. 20 One it's way too vague, 21 right? We're talking specifically about the little ice age and how that came to 22 be based on some volcanic eruption, 23 some mystery, volcanic eruption. So describing periods in earth, 24 recent geologic history, too vague. 25 We can also talk about the idea of the word recent. 26 Now we're talking, you can read further in the paragraph about like the 27 13th centur...