Bear in mind that the SAT tests literacy skills and math skills separately.  Reading comprehension is unequivocally something that should be included in the <i>reading and writing</i> portion of the test, rather than the <i>math</i> portion.<p>Read some of the comments elsewhere in this discussion.  There are some people that noticed how &quot;209 salads and drinks&quot; could be interpreted as &quot;209 salads, and an unspecified quantity of drinks&quot; or as &quot;209 * ( a salad or a drink )&quot;.  That has nothing to do with one&#x27;s ability to take a system of two equations and two variables and solve it for either variable, and everything to do with poor question design.<p>Professional pollsters work very hard at tuning the exact wording of poll questions, to eliminate hidden biases in the question itself and to better reveal what the participants themselves think.  These samples have non-mathematical bias embedded in the questions.