A few months ago, we started posting more regularly to our YouTube and TikTok channels. The videos we began sharing were mostly what those platforms refer to as shorts: sub-60-second dives into questions that help students understand just how quickly they can tackle math questions on the SAT and ACT.
The following four shorts are the ones that have been our most popular. The first is from the ACT and was #51 on its test, which means that it’s a pretty tough problem (the ACT math section goes up to #60, and the problems increase in difficulty as you get closer to the end of the section). The ACT sometimes makes up symbols to indicate a certain operation done to the numbers in the problem, and here it’s a “#” meant to throw students off balance.
As we see in the video, this problem isn’t as bad as it seems.
This next one comes from the SAT, and it’s initially intimidating to many students because of the use of a square root and because it refers to the diagonal of a rectangle, both of which might confuse some students.
Let’s see how to solve it.
This third video is another from the ACT. We could expect the difficulty level of this one to be similar to that of the question in our first video, but since this one is #45, perhaps the test writers intended for this one to be slightly simpler.
Notice we’re expected to add two fractions that don’t have a common denominator, which is what we’ll find to help us in this one.
Did you catch that trick? That’s probably what made that a popular video! Not surprisingly, our next most popular video uses a similar fractions trick, except this time we see it on the SAT to subtract two fractions.
And here's how to handle it.
Based on how popular those last two have been, maybe we should make more videos using that trick to add or subtract fractions! If you found these shorts helpful, check out our YouTube and TikTok channels, and please share this post and those channels with your friends. Also check out our self-paced ACT and SAT courses, the latter of which we’ve recently updated to prepare students for the new digital SAT, which comes to the United States starting in March 2024. Good luck to you as you study for your test!
