Drawing graphs can also make a solution appear out of thin air. Even if a problem doesn’t ask you to express anything in graphic terms, you might find that a rough sketch of, say, the velocity of a particle with respect to time will give you a much clearer sense of what you’re dealing with.

 

    And don’t forget to write down those equations! Writing down all the equations you can think of may lead you to a correct answer even if you don’t really understand the question. Suppose you know the problem deals with an electric circuit, and you’re given values for current and electric potential. Write down equations like V = IR and P = IV, plug in values, fiddle around a little, and see if you can come up with an answer that looks right.

 

 

    Remember, on SAT II Physics you’re not allowed to use a calculator, and you’re only given, on average, 48 seconds to answer each question. If you’re working on a problem and find yourself writing out lines and lines of simultaneous equations, trying to figure out or trying to recall your trig identities, you’re probably on the wrong track. These questions are designed in such a way that, if you understand what you’re being asked, you will need at most a couple of simple calculations to get the right answer.

 

 

    In General Hint 6: Know How To Guess, we explained the virtues of eliminating answers you know to be wrong and taking a guess. On most questions, there will be at least one or two answer choices you can eliminate. There are also certain styles of questions that lend themselves to particular process-of-elimination methods.

 

    The weakness of classification questions is that the same five answer choices apply to several questions. Invariably, some of these answer choices will be tempting for some questions but not for others. For instance, you can be pretty sure that kinetic energy isn’t measured in hertz: E may be a tempting answer choice for other questions but not for that one, so you can eliminate it.

 

    Another point that may help you guess in a is that you’ll rarely find that the same answer choice is correct for two different questions. The directions for classification questions explicitly state that an answer choice “may be used once, more than once, or not at all,” but on the whole, the ETS people shy away from the “more than once” possibility. This is by no means a sure bet, but if you’re trying to eliminate answers, you might want to eliminate those choices that you’ve already used on other questions in the same set.