My dual mandate is to help my APUSH and SAT students and Substack subscribers prepare for their upcoming tests. Today’s Winning Word is DISCREPANCY. Hopefully, there will be no DISCREPANCIES or differences between everyone’s preparation and scores on the upcoming tests. Here goes! Let’s do it!!
APUSH
On March 31, 1776, Abigail Adams wrote a celebrated letter to her husband John Adams, who was then serving as the Massachusetts representative to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Keenly aware that the delegates were on the verge of composing a Declaration of Independence, Abigail urged her husband to “Remember the Ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands.”
Like most of his male contemporaries, John Adams refused to apply the logic of liberty to the status of women. He sarcastically replied, “I cannot but laugh…We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems.”
Abigail’s famous request underscored the fact that colonial women were treated as second-class citizens. Her letter also demonstrated that some colonial women were aware of the DISCREPANCY between the republican ideal of equality and the reality of how women were treated.
SAT
DISCREPANCY is now making frequent appearances in BOTH answers to critical reading passages AND vocabulary in context questions!
Let’s begin with a recent critical reading passage on oil shocks. It turns out that economists are able to make broad generalizations about how oil shocks affect the global economy. But they are unable to make country-specific conclusions. This DISCREPANCY remains unresolved pending the creation of more sophisticated methods of collecting data.
The DISCREPANCY between global and country-specific date on the effects of oil shocks is a very academic topic. Stay tuned, there’s more! SAT test writers have a seemingly endless supply of obscure topics to illustrate DISCREPANCY. For example, a recent vocabulary in context question pointed out that ecologists are concerned about DISCREPANCIES between traditional descriptions of pollination syndromes and recent empirical observations of floral trait combinations.
OK, don’t panic! The key to all of these DISCREPANCY questions is to realize that there is a DIFFERENCE in the data that is causing an unwanted DISCREPANCY or lack of agreement between facts, claims, or observations.
DISCREPANCY – a difference, inconsistency, or lack of agreement between two or more reports that should ideally match