SAT Strategy #1: What's Curious About The Problem?
This may be the most important strategy because most of the problems are designed to be solved in a simple way. Very often, there is a key or trick, that once recognized allows you to easily solve the problem. See the examples below. You definitely don’t want to get caught up in long calculations. It’s a sign you are going about it in the wrong way.
Before jumping in and steaming ahead on a problem, look to see if there is anything that’s curious about it. Do you see any patterns or interesting relationships amongst any of the given values or expressions? Paying attention to what’s curious will help you find the best approach without wasting time. Here are a couple of examples.
Draw the triangle and observe that one leg has a length of 4 units and the hypotenuse, 5 units. What's curious? It's a 3-4-5 right triangle! The other leg is 3, so tan P = 3/4.
Before you automatically begin solving for x, look first at the expression on the left side of the given equation, and now look at the expression we want the value for. What's curious? Notice that 2x + 1 is just half of 4x + 2. So, 2x + 1 = 1/2 of 4. The answer is 2.