miniQuiz Week of 4/21/2026

1. One way to organically commit things to memory is to physically(whether this be by hand or by keyboard) copy things. Accordingly, in your reply to this week’s miniQUIZ, type out what’s below.

We do not all need to call what we call Understanding Equations(UE) questions UE’s. But, we all want to get very comfortable with classic UE’s. And, many of us want to become absolutely incredible at smashing all UE’s. These are questions that contain equations that we are not traditionally solving. At the heart of UE’s is INTERPRETING things from the given equations.

*Bonus - Do you notice something about how we started the second and third sentences up above?

Are most of us still being taught in middle school not to start sentences with words like “And” and “But”? If you were taught this, let’s reconfigure your thoughts on this front. These two words and others are quite ok to start sentences.

2. Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

Hercule Poirot was often cryptic in his _____ whether this was due to him finding his own amusement within the process or if doing so served a deeper purpose, only he maybe knew.

A) responses; B) responses C) responses: D) responses,

The correct answer is (A).

Did we nip you here with option (C)? More about this option in a moment.

Let’s first acknowledge that if you selected (B) or (D), you want to….

• i)
  Get more fluent with our friend the semicolon.
• ii)
  Get in to the habit of evaluating certain options before others.

Depending on what Path you’re currently on, you may want to be ok with selecting (C) here. On a Path to 700+, you probably want to feel good about why (C) is not quite right here.

If a colon was correct for this question, what would have come after the colon would have elaborated on the “responses”. For instance, the sentence would have been something like, “Hercule Poirot was often cryptic in his responses: some were so hard to understand that the receiver would have felt less confused if M. Poirot had said nothing.”

In what’s above, what’s comes after the colon is continuing to talk directly about the “responses”. In the sentence within the question, what’s coming after the correctly used semicolon is not directly elaborating on the “responses”.

If the distinction we’re making feels to subtle right now, this is quite likely a zero issue. We can score a 580 and miss this question; we can score a 680 and miss this question.

3. Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

The feats of various animals are so grand that many are truly outside the comprehension of both keen observers and laypeople. The Arctic Tern’s migratory path can reach up to 90,000 kilometers. _____ flying non-stop for 11 days, Bar-tailed Godwits traverse from Alaska all the way to New Zealand and Australia.

A) Similarly, B) Accordingly, C) In effect, D) In addition,

The correct answer is (A).

Option (C) is what we would consider an oddball, and, as is regularly the case, what this oddball means/does kind of really does not matter to us.

If you selected (B), maybe read up a bit on this lesser known, but worth knowing cause & effect transition.

What you’re seeing here is what we can likely consider a classic use of the transition “Similarly”, when the same thing is being said about someone/something different. In the sentence right before the blank, we get a sense of the extraordinary migratory thing the Arctic Tern can do. After the blank, we get a sense of how Bar-tailed Godwits can also do something quite marvelous on the migratory front.

We get why option (D) would be selected(especially since we wrote this question so that (D) would be a tempting option to many of us). But, if “In addition” was meant to be correct here, what we would anticipate coming after the blank is more information about the Arctic Tern.

4. Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

The home range of a polar bear can exceed 200,000 square kilometers. The apparent requirement of such a _____ tract of land is tied to the noble animal’s hunting habits on sea ice, which calls for vast stretches of land in order for this majestic bear to be properly accommodated.

A) expansive B) specious C) elevated D) superfluous

The correct answer is (A).

First, does it concern you at all that three consecutive answers happen to be the same letter? If so, maybe train to not even notice if something like this happens, because it can happen, and it’s not something odd or special.

Second, did it concern you that two of the answer options are words that start with a vowel? If so, then you can leave this conversation knowing that this is not something the test writers have historically messed about with. It’s understandable if you thought it could be a thing. But, until further notice, it is not a thing.

With those possible concerns acknowledged, let’s close out this analysis by acknowledging that sometimes a question is one that you just smoothly get and nothing clever is lurking underneath. We could point out the quotable clue of “vast” or the mention of “200,000 square kilometers”. And, maybe we’ll talk about the two s-words that are here at some point…

5. The home range of a certain polar bear is 203,254 square kilometers. What is this polar bear’s home range in square miles? (1 kilometer = 0.621 miles)

A) 78,383.1 B) 126,220.7 C) 327,301.1 D) 527,055.0

The correct answer is (A).

We could acknowledge two things here.

There’s the Conversion Q side of things. Having a feel for this, we would not select either option (C) or (D).

Then, there’s the Conversion Trick side of things, which is how we would dodge selecting (B).

You certainly do not have to write things out like what’s below, but doing so is one confident way to arrive at the correct answer of (A).

• $203254 km^2 x \nicefrac{.621 mile}{1} km x \nicefrac{.621 mile}{1 km}$

6. A cube has a surface area of 1,000 cubic feet. To the nearest foot, what is the volume of this cube?

The correct answer is 2152.

Well, option (A) couldn’t be the answer to this one.😬 And, before you CHOOSE to read this analysis, keep in mind that you can very much CHOOSE to simply not care about this question. We’ll see you in the next, much-more-important-to-all-of-us analysis.

….

….

If you’re still reading(which maybe you still want to rethink), we start by acknowledging that we do not acknowledge formulas when it comes to surface area. In this case, a cube has 6 equal faces, so we can start by dividing 1000 by 6, yielding the mildly unappealing 166.6666667. We can then understand this number to the area of any single face of the cube. As this face is a square, to determine the side length, we can square root 166.666667 to arrive at an even more unappealing 12.90994449. As this number is the side length of any edge of the cube, we can now cube this number, since the length x width x height would yield the volume that we are looking for. With 2151.657415 potentially on our calculators, the last thing to do is note how we are being told to express our answer.

As a final comment, if you first cube rooted 1000 to get to 10, we were seeking to draw people in to executing such a move. As you’ll get to know, the test writers seek such things. Knowing they do, we mirror some of their moves, so that you can then train to elude them.

7. Which of the following equations represents an ellipse in the $xy-plane$ that intersects the x-axis at exactly one point?

A) $9(x - 2)^2 + 4(y - 1)^2 = 36$ B) $4(x - 2)^2 + 9(y - 1)^2 = 36$ C) $4(x - 2)^2 + 9(y + 2)^2 = 36$ D) $9(x - 2)^2 + 4(y + 2)^2 = 36$

The correct answer is (C).

We could see the word “intersects” and think desmos. We could also know that desmos has a thing for circles, and though an ellipse is not a circle, we could maybe think that it could be close enough to then choose to see if desmos could get the job done for us here.

If you selected (A) here, there are two pages of ours you may want to give a visit….

• i) great habits tied to Mat
• ii) the nitpickiness tied to great execution

In case it was not crystal clear, if we type the equation within option (C) in to desmos, we will see that the ellipse intersects the x-axis at one point.

the nsivwotw(not-so-important-vocab-word-of-the-week)

punctilious

definition - very attentive to detail

more importantly….it would be very fair to think that this

word is maybe related to being punctual, as there is certainly

a spelling connection between the two words. Because, this

association could be made, it could be something the test

writers might seek to exploit in the future.

*Bonus - Do you know something about the word “exploit” that we, as strong test takers, could find interesting to know?

As you can read here, the word “exploit” does not have to always be used in a negative manner.

*After you submit your answers, if you do not know what it means to mcm a question, there’ll be a link to click.

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