Consider this marketing question: Which is more important to the success of breakfast cereals, mineral waters, and other consumer goods – the price of the product or how many stores sell the product? SAT test writers have written a passage summarizing a comprehensive study of this question. The results should not have surprised anyone. The breadth or extent of a product’s retail distribution is more important than its price.
But wait! Although the study’s finding is clear, the answer to the vocabulary in context question is far from obvious. SAT test writers inform test-takers that pricing is not unimportant. The key phrase “though hardly” plays a key role in the passage. Pricing is thus hardly or far from being IMMATERIAL TO or irrelevant to a product’s success.
The choice DETERMINATIVE OF tempted many students. DETERMINATIVE OF describes a deciding or controlling factor. Using DETERMINATVE OF would imply that pricing is the decisive, single-factor cause. It is important to note that the passage stresses that pricing plays a relevant though smaller role than the breadth of a brand’s distribution.
IMMATERIAL TO – irrelevant; unimportant
DETERMINATIVE OF – a deciding controlling factor
APUSH BONUS EXAMPLE
The 1848 Seneca Falls Convention marked the beginning of the women’s rights movement in America. At that time, married women lacked the formal right to own property or to sign legal documents. Conservative critics argued that without individual property ownership, discussing female voting rights was irrelevant since voter eligibility in earlier decades had historically been tied to property ownership. Stanton and her allies successfully countered that a woman’s formal property status
was IMMATERIAL to her natural rights as a citizen under the principles of the Declaration of Independence.