How to Ace Boring Reading Passages

We’ve all been there – working through the most boring Reading passage, hoping not to fall asleep, rereading the same sentence again and again and again.

While some measure of boredom is unavoidable when Reading SAT & ACT passages, we do need to minimize that boredom because the more interested in the task we are, the better we will be able to pay attention to the passage, the questions, and the answer choices. All of this translates into higher scores.

Some passages may be inherently interesting to you – treasure those because I can’t imagine that will occur frequently. But what should you do about those boring passages? How do you maintain focus when working through them? I offer you a strategy for doing so in the video below, a strategy that goes beyond the typical advice of “pretend you’re interested in the passage.” No amount of pretending will ever substitute for the real thing, so we need to take a different strategy – and this strategy dovetails perfectly with our Core Strategy for Reading on both the SAT and ACT.