Tooth and Nail: A Novel Approach to the SAT (A Harvest Test Preparation Book)

by Charles Harrington Elster

  Each time you open this book, review the words you learned in the last section you read. Look them up again in the glossary, and keep a dictionary close by so you can read the other definitions and also pronunciation. As they say, practice makes perfect, and review is the key to building a tenacious (as opposed to an evanescent) vocabulary.

  Remember that SAT words don’t just appear on the test—they can pop up anywhere. Keep Tooth and Nail and a dictionary nearby while you’re doing your reading for classes. When you come across a challenging word, see if it’s in the glossary. If not, look it up in your dictionary. Also, try to read a newspaper or magazine for a few minutes every day with the goal of finding one or two words you don’t know.

  Finally, challenge yourself every few days to use two or three of your newly acquired SAT words in a pertinent way, either in conversation or in writing.

  As you can see, Tooth and Nail will expose you to lots of SAT words in context, but the responsibility for mastering them ultimately lies with you. We hope our “novel approach” will inspire you to assiduously build your word knowledge and fight tooth and nail to ace the SAT.

  Charles Harrington Elster

  San Diego, California

  Joseph Elliot

  Brooklyn, New York

  Chapter 1

  Off to College

  A Saturday in early September

  Caitlin Ciccone knew what was coming and she dreaded it. They were standing by the gate waiting for the call to board the plane.

  “Don’t say it, Dad. Please.”

  But he said it anyway.

  “‘Parting is such sweet sorrow,’ my dear.”

  Caitlin rolled her eyes. “Dad, I swear!”

  “Don’t swear, Caitlin. Remember what Juliet told Romeo? ‘Do not swear at all; or if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self.’”

  “Yes, I know, but—”

  “But nothing. I’m sending my daughter—my only child—off to college. Can’t I be a little sentimental?”

  Caitlin stuffed her hands in the pockets of her faded jeans and prepared for the inevitable. Her father was an English professor who loved to quote Shakespeare. Sometimes he couldn’t help being a bit pretentious and verbose.

  “My little scholar, off to ‘suck the sweets of sweet philosophy’ as the eloquent Shakespeare put it so aptly in The Taming of the Shrew. Now, I want you to keep in mind Tranio’s advice: ‘No profit grows where is no pleasure taken.’”

  Caitlin listened stoically as her father delivered his grandiloquent valedictory address. When the flight was announced, he held out his arms and they hugged for a long time.

  “I’ll miss you, sweetheart. Be assiduous. Work hard.”

  “I will. And I’ll write—a lot.”

  “You’d better. I don’t want you racking up the exorbitant phone bills you do at home.”

  “I won’t.”

  “But call if you need anything.”

  Caitlin kissed her father’s cheek. “Thanks, Dad. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.” She brushed back her long black hair, picked up her bags, and strode through the gate.

  Caitlin had said goodbye to her mother on the phone the night before, and her mother had cried. Her parents had been divorced for six years, since she was twelve. Throughout her four years at the High School for Literature and the Performing Arts in Manhattan, she had lived with her mother one month and her father the next.

  On the plane to Chicago, Caitlin thought about how all the moving back and forth had wreaked havoc on her social life. Perhaps to compensate for that disruption, she had applied herself to her schoolwork, earning straight A’s in English and scoring high on her SATs. In her senior year she was elected editor of the school newspaper and at graduation she was salutatorian, ranking second in her class behind a nerd who wound up going to Harvard. The reward for all her diligence was a generous scholarship to Holyfield College, one of the most prestigious schools in the Midwest, with excellent programs in her primary interests, English and journalism.

  In Chicago she changed planes for Des Moines, Iowa, where she boarded a bus for Holyfield, a small city another two hours away.

  Caitlin stared out the window as the bus plowed down straight two-lane roads through the rich abundance of the flat midwestern farmland. Acres and acres of tall, tasseled corn rolled by, along with rippling fields of hay and a lovely, golden sort of grass that she thought might be wheat. Quiescent cows looked up as the bus passed. Garrulous birds congregated on power lines and circled over fields and barns. It was beautiful country, wholesome and salutary, she thought, but so alien compared with the familiar concrete and congestion of New York City.

  A sign for the City of Holyfield flashed by the window, rousing Caitlin from her contemplative mood. Within minutes the bus arrived at the terminal downtown. Caitlin quickly gathered her belongings and made her way to the taxi stand outside.

  The young cab driver tipped back the brim of her Minnesota Twins baseball cap and slung her arm over the front seat.

  “Hi. You must be going up to the college, huh?”

  “That’s right,” Caitlin answered cheerfully.

  “Are you a freshman?”

  “Does it show?”

  “Maybe just a little,” the driver said with a smile. “My name’s Annie. I go to Holyfield too. I’m a junior.”

  “Really? Glad to meet you, Annie. I’m Caitlin.”

  “You sound like you’re from back East, Caitlin.”

  “Yeah, from New York City.”

  “I grew up right here in Holyfield. It’s a great place. The air’s clean and the people are friendly.”

  Caitlin laughed. “That’ll be a nice change from New York.”

  Annie turned around and started the engine. “So where can I take you?”

  “Ummm, East Quad, Prospero Gate, I think.”

  “Which dorm are you in?”

  “LaSalle Hall.”

  “That’s in West Quad, on the opposite side of campus.”

  “I thought I’d walk across and get familiar with things.”

  “Are you sure? That’s a long walk with luggage.”

  “Don’t worry. My bags aren’t too heavy. I like to travel light. My folks are shipping the rest of my stuff.”

  “Okay, Prospero Gate it is,” Annie said, pulling away from the curb.

  As the cab glided through the downtown traffic, Caitlin dug out her campus map and opened it on her lap. Holyfield College, with its nineteen hundred students, lay not in the center but on the periphery of town. The seventy-five-acre urban campus had a symmetrical layout that reminded Caitlin of a baseball diamond. Cedar, Chickasaw, State, and Madison streets defined the perimeter, and College and Holyfield streets bisected its sides into four large quads. At the corners, where the bases would be, were four main gates.

  Caitlin smiled when she saw the X she had written in the block indicating the Student Center in South Quad. From reading the college catalogue she had gleaned that the center housed the office of the Holyfield Herald, the campus daily.

  The cab stopped at a red light and Annie looked at Caitlin in the rearview mirror. “I think you’ll like Holyfield. There’s always something interesting going on.”

  “Oh yeah? Like what?”

  The light turned green and Annie stepped on the accelerator. “Movies, plays, concerts, sports—whatever you’re into. The mixers are pretty good, especially when you’re just getting to know people. Then there are some traditional campus-wide blowouts, like the Spring Fling.”

  “What happens then?”

  “On the day the dogwood trees bloom in Olsen Garden, everybody puts on shorts and T-shirts or bathing suits and goes to the garden for a big water-balloon fight. Last year there was still snow on the ground and we froze our buns off. But it’s great because it’s totally impulsive and spontaneous.”

  Annie chuckled. “The most incredible event, though, is the Halloween masquerade. Every year a bunch of seniors from Jefferson Hall dress up in gorilla out
fits and run around instigating whatever trouble they can get away with. At five o’clock they crash Guild Hall and jump around the president’s office for a while, until they’re officially crowned kings and queens of the masquerade. Then after dinner they lead a parade up to Steinbach Commons, where there’s a huge costume party.”

  “That sounds wild,” Caitlin said. Down the tree-lined street she could see the buildings at the edge of campus.

  Annie braked for a stoplight. “Here’s Spenser Gate. Most of the off-campus action is up there on Chickasaw. You can shop there, and there are good places to eat too. You like pizza?”

  “‘Like’ is an understatement. I practically live on it.”

  Annie turned right onto State Street. “Then you should check out Salerno’s. A lot of people hang out at Pesto Palace, but it’s rowdy and kind of tacky and definitely not for the frugal person on a tight budget, like me. In my opinion, Salerno’s is the best in town.”

  Caitlin could taste the pizza already.

  A minute later Annie maneuvered the cab through a maze of vehicles and double-parked in front of a massive stone archway. Caitlin paid the tab and gave Annie a twenty-five percent tip.

  “Hey, thanks a lot!” Annie said. “If everybody tipped like that, I’d have no trouble paying my way through medical school.”

  “You want to be a doctor?”

  Annie laughed. “I don’t plan on driving a cab forever, and I’m certainly not double-majoring in chemistry and biology for the fun of it. Look,” she added, scribbling on the back of a receipt, “here’s my phone number. You need anything—a ride, someone to talk to, whatever—just give me a call, okay?”

  “Sure, Annie. Thanks.” Caitlin took the paper and put it in her purse. “See you around.”

  She grabbed her bags, climbed out of the cab, and plunged into the mass of people passing through Prospero Gate.

  Phil McKnight set down his two ponderous suitcases and camera bag on the sidewalk outside Prospero Gate. All around him a bustling crowd of students and families and friends unloaded sedans, station wagons, vans, and Jeeps.

  Two days ago Phil had left his neighborhood and high school friends and brother and sister and parents in San Diego, California, and boarded a train that had taken him to Las Vegas, then Salt Lake City, then through the Rocky Mountains to Denver, then over the plains to Omaha, and finally to Osceola, Iowa. From there he had taken a bus to the City of Holyfield. Others might have been impatient with such a protracted trip, but Phil had no regrets about his choice of transportation. The train had been much less expensive than flying, and he had enjoyed seeing the country.

  As he watched the taxi dwindle to the size of a matchbox, Phil remembered how worried and vulnerable his mother had looked when she had said goodbye and how as he got on the train his dad had told him it was okay to be scared because everyone else going off to college was probably scared too. Now, standing before the entrance to his home for the next four years, Phil had to admit he was nervous, but he wasn’t scared. Something told him everything was going to be fine.

  Phil took a deep breath, enjoying the novel feeling of complete autonomy. It’s great being on your own, he thought, especially when you’ve got a chunk of money saved up from working all summer caddying for the prosperous golfers at Mission Trails Country Club.

  It was a mild day, but the crisp smell of fall already filled the air. Dead leaves scraped along the sidewalk, blown by light gusts of wind. Phil zipped up his red-and-white Hoover High School varsity jacket. Shading his eyes from the midafternoon sun, he surveyed the scene.

  So this is Holyfield College, he thought.

  Facing the street were two monolithic buildings of roughly hewn masonry. Ivy, with thick vines at the base, crawled up the sides, and the stone, dark and damp and stained, seemed ancient. Phil’s sense of architecture was defined chiefly by the graceful Spanish stucco, squat bungalow, and prosaic post-World War II ranch styles common in San Diego, and he had difficulty placing these staid buildings. They were of a different order altogether.

  As he looked at them he could hear Mr. Alvarez, his eighth-grade earth science teacher, describing the vast glacier that had come down out of Canada, flattened the antediluvian Midwest, and melted, leaving a sea that stretched out over what became the prairies and fertile plains of the American frontier. Phil pictured this glacier plowing through Iowa, leveling the earth and wearing itself down to the point where it dropped these two impressive edifices in its path, and here they stood.

  A grandiose arch spanned the gap between the buildings. Squinting, Phil noticed that the elaborately carved stone contained two sculpted faces: William Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe, one of his favorite writers. Under the arch an imposing iron gate stood open to the flood of arriving students hustling in and out of the passageway.

  Phil reached into his camera bag and pulled out the map that had been sent to him in August. He located Prospero Gate and saw that the adjacent buildings were Fogborn, which housed the Philosophy Department, and Wright, home of the African-American Studies Department. Let’s see, he thought, to get to Ericson Hall—

  “Heads up, dude!”

  Phil turned and saw two brawny students carrying an overstuffed sofa. They were coming at a slow trot directly at him. Evidently, they didn’t intend to slow down.

  He quickly moved his bags, narrowly avoiding a collision. Marveling at the breadth of both the sofa and the burly pair who were lugging it so industriously, Phil mused that perhaps these were football players assigned to help new arrivals, or perhaps moving furniture was part of their conditioning program.

  Phil stuck the map in his pocket, picked up his luggage, and joined the crowd under the arch. Up ahead he noticed an attractive young woman in a sleek leather jacket. Her long, raven-black hair flipped and bobbed in the wind as she maneuvered through the press like an erratic driver on the freeway.

  Chapter 2

  Entrance Examination

  Growing up in New York City, Caitlin had learned that walking was a lot like driving—a complex skill whose subtleties were too often taken for granted, sometimes with catastrophic consequences. She knew that to become proficient at either activity, you must follow four fundamental rules: First, assert yourself, but don’t be aggressive; there is a big difference between exploiting an opportunity and asking for trouble. Second, keep moving or you’ll be eaten alive. Third, keep your distance. And last, keep a wary eye out for the unpredictable; never overestimate the competence of those around you.

  With these precepts in mind, Caitlin weaved through the sluggish human traffic in the East Quad courtyard like a veteran. The way to West Quad and LaSalle Hall would take her by several prominent buildings on campus, and she was eager to see how Holyfield looked up close. She charted a diagonal route across the quad, heading for Holyfield Street.

  “Hey, Leather Lady! Want some help with those bags?” called a gruff voice behind her.

  Leather Lady? Must be my jacket, Caitlin thought. She glanced over her shoulder. Two husky young men in sweatsuits, probably football players, were jogging toward her carrying a large, somewhat dilapidated couch.

  “You’ll need to grow another set of arms, guys.”

  “Just toss your stuff on the couch. We’re headed for Larraby. What’s your destination?”

  For a moment Caitlin toyed with the idea of accepting the offer of help. But what if her new roommates saw her arrive with a couple of sweaty jocks in tow? She decided she was better off on her own for now.

  “I’m going to LaSalle. It’s out of your way. I’ll make it all right, thanks.”

  The two bruisers smiled and resumed trotting with the sofa down the path.

  Caitlin studied the people she passed along the way. She had read innumerable catalogues in her quest for the right college, and all had claimed to “encourage cultural diversity” and “nurture individual expression.” She was gratified that the school she had chosen appeared to live up to those commendable egalitarian claims
, for all around her she saw a hodgepodge of humanity—all shapes, sizes, and colors, in all manner of dress, from the formal and conventional to the most eccentric and bizarre.

  The notion of bright and talented women and men of every ethnic and socioeconomic background and from all parts of the country coming together in the heartland of America to broaden their horizons kindled Caitlin’s interest and stimulated her imagination. In such a heterogeneous environment, she felt sure she’d fit in.

  When she reached Holyfield Street she saw the campus art gallery, which bore a colorful sign for an exhibit called “Shakespeare’s Colleagues: Artists and Artisans of Elizabethan England.” Further on she saw the quaint, ivy-covered red brick campus chapel with its adjoining bell tower, a dominant landmark that she recognized from the photograph on the cover of the college catalogue.

  Beside the tower was an odd structure not included in the photograph—an austere building that Caitlin didn’t remember being identified on the map. She looked at the heavy wooden door and somber stone walls and wondered how such a discordant element had come to exist among the otherwise harmonious and benign buildings on campus. There was something eerie about the place, she thought.

  She continued walking and a minute later reached the corner of College and Holyfield streets—the center of campus. Across the way, rising high like a cathedral of enlightenment, stood Tillinghast Library. Its Gothic eminence eclipsed everything else on the street. Caitlin imagined generations of pensive scholars perusing stacks of old brown books filled with the wisdom of the ages.