Yes, that happened on April 6 — a mere four days away from April 10! What are the odds?? Well, they're actually pretty good, given that the Masters is held at the same time every year. Everything that happens at the Masters is going to happen on or "almost" on some anniversary of everything else that ever happened at the Masters. Busbee's wonderment is like someone marveling that Barack Obama's inaugural address happened on the exact anniversary of Jack Kennedy's.

Then as if that weren't retro enough, I got home and Mazzy Star was trending on Twitter.

I was also partial to the screenshot in which a document with the header "Estate Planning: Burial List" was accompanied by a cheerful cartoon dog asking, "What shall we do next, Buddy?"

• how is huck finn kind hearted?
  
• who is the best girl he ever seen and had the most sand
  
• list at least 2 humorous accounts and explain the humor.
  
• how did the american political system fail to solve the crises of the 1850s
  
• in the gettysburg address what is the new freedom he is talking about
  
• three important decisions ulysses grant made during his presidency
  

I could go on — there are dozens of these.

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▸ Vallejo man's eyeball plucked out in altercation

…why was that recommended for me?

	(A)	disapproved of many of the choices her mother made in her life
	(B)	demonstrated that every decision her mother had ever made was wrong

Where's the passage? What's the question? It probably doesn't matter! Unless the question is something like "Which of the following is NOT true," the answer is almost certainly going to be (A), because correct answers on the SAT are rarely written in such an extreme manner as (B). One of the reasons test prep works is that heuristics like these are actually very successful in raising scores.

After I posted the pineapple article, I found comments on many different social networks and bulletin boards arguing that, contrary to what I had suggested in the article, the reason the animals ate the pineapple was that they were hungry. I gave several reasons why that was unlikely to be the credited response, but if I were teaching a student who simply wanted to get a high score rather than a member of the public who wanted to discuss whether it was a good question or not, I would probably start by talking about pattern recognition. "Hungry" just isn't the sort of answer that tends to be right on a standardized test question like this. There are various names for these sorts of answer choices, and while I obviously wouldn't use this term with a student, one name I've heard from time to time among developers is "Aspie trap."

Most of the arguments I encountered online weren't as manifestly autistic as the one that said that the animals were hungry because two of them were birds and after watching a race for two hours a bird would be famished… but it seems worth noting that that's the kind of thinking that these exercises are designed to penalize. Very often the ability to think beyond the literal is the main skill being tested in a reading comprehension section, and literal answers are offered as bait. Sometimes, as is the case here, this takes the form of testing whether students recognize the emotional underpinnings of the events of a story. On the SAT and ACT there are generally textual clues that give the answers away, but part of the point of my article was that I don't think it's necessarily out of bounds to test a student's ability to recognize patterns of human behavior. You can argue that that's not "reading comprehension," but if part of reading comprehension is understanding literature, and part of understanding literature is possessing some measure of empathy for what characters are experiencing, I'd argue that it is.

(At other times, it takes the form of testing whether students can spot irony. I spent a lot of afternoons in the mid-'00s commuting down to the South Bay in a futile attempt to help the children of "tiger parents" recognize when what they'd just read was a joke.)