The most important secret or top strategy I suggest with the reading passages is to read the passages quickly but answer the questions slowly. In other words, since you only get points for answering questions correctly, you don't want to spend a lot of time reading the passages slowly trying to understand every nuance or every detail of the passage. Most of the information's not going to be important; they're not going to ask you about it. Your first read-through should be done quickly -- just worrying about the main ideas. That way you'll have a lot of time to deal with the questions. When you're reading the passage through, I suggest marking it up -- underlining certain phrases or key words. When they're long and fairly boring, I suggest writing brief two- or three-word notes in the margin of each paragraph to help keep you focused. But you do want to get through it fairly quickly so you'll have lots of time to answer the questions.