How Finding Easter Eggs in Your Favorite Movies Can Help You Make Inferences on the SSAT
If you’re a fan of Disney movies or the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you’ve likely heard of Easter eggs.
Nope, not the plastic kind filled with jelly beans.
Easter eggs in movies are crafty details and inside jokes that aren’t apparent to a casual film watcher. Think R2-D2 and C-3PO hiding in hieroglyphics behind Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Or Rapunzel and Eugene from Tangled attending Princess Elsa’s coronation in Frozen.
Searching out these obscure references is fun in its own right. But Easter egg hunting has another benefit: practicing finding these hidden clues will give you a leg up on SSAT inference questions.
What are Inferences?
Making an inference requires you to build off clues in a text (be it an SSAT passage or a movie) to make a logical conclusion that’s not explicitly stated.
And hunting for Easter eggs is a great example of inference-making in real life.
To find Easter eggs, film buffs watch a movie carefully, slowing clips down and rewatching them to search for details that might be significant. Once they’ve found something notable, they match up what they know about the movie, the director’s background, or the production company’s other works with the clues they find.
You make an inference on the SSAT in roughly the same way. To reach accurate conclusions, you need to follow these steps:
Understand what the text is about (i.e. identify the main idea)
Return to the text and reread to catch small details - even the tiny ones that seem insignificant
Brainstorm why those details might matter. Do they connect to another idea? Or reveal important insights?
Inferences and Easter Eggs in Action
For an example of this process in action, let’s use the Lightyear movie’s teaser trailer. Like many Pixar movies, it is riddled with potential inferences to be made.
The trailer shows us that the plot of the movie centers on Buzz Lightyear. But Buzz is no longer a toy – he’s an actual astronaut doing some kind of experimental flight. He has astronaut coworkers, a cute robot cat, and the same catch phrase from the Toy Story movies.
But we can glean even more than that if we pay attention to some revealing details.
I found these details thanks to Youtuber Eric Voss of the New Rockstars channel. In the following video, he breaks down the trailer, making inferences about the Pixar universe and the movie’s themes. (You can watch the whole video or just get the highlights below!)
First, note how Voss’s explanation follows the steps we listed above.
In the very beginning of the video, he makes sure we understand what the trailer is about, clarifying that this is the movie the Buzz Lightyear toy is based on in the Toy Story universe. As the video plays, he frequently returns to clips from the trailer, pausing and replaying frames to draw our attention to tiny details. Then he makes inferences and speculates why those details matter.
For example, Voss observes around 1:15 in the video that as Buzz and the rest of the astronauts walk around their planet, they don’t wear space suits or helmets. Why is that significant? This shows the astronauts can breathe the planet’s air, leading Voss to infer that this planet was perhaps chosen as the home of Star Command because it seems to have an Earth-like atmosphere.
At 2:03, Voss also notes that the robots scuttling around the planet look familiar – somewhat like Wall-E. Since Wall-E is also a Pixar movie in which humans head to outer space, he infers that Buzz’s mission might be part of Operation Recolonize, the reason all the humans fled Earth in the Wall-E film.
Voss even uses clues from the trailer’s soundtrack. At 7:40, he breaks down “Starman” by David Bowie, the song playing in the background. He catches that the chorus has a similar pattern of notes as “Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz. He knows that Dorothy is a lonely traveler who has to find her way in a brand new world, and he infers that Buzz may have similar experiences in Lightyear. Without watching the film, we might already have an idea about some of its themes.
Inferences in the SSAT
Ready to make some of your own inferences to prep for the SSAT? Let’s warm up with a Lightyear-themed inference question.
What can be reasonably inferred from the 01 on Buzz’s helmet (visible at 0:20 and 0:30 in the trailer)?
a. Buzz will be first to die in the movie.
b. Buzz is the first toy of his kind.
c. Buzz works alone.
d. Buzz is the first astronaut to attempt this kind of flight.
e. Buzz is the sole astronaut capable of flight.
The first thing you’d need to do to answer this question is watch the trailer and generally understand what it’s about. It’s significantly less likely you’ll get the correct answer if you don’t have any comprehension of the plot.
Then, after reading the question, return to the text where you spot the 01. For this example, you’ve been given the timestamp of the clip. For some SSAT questions, you may be given a line number. What do you think this detail might be showing? What is the number 01 often used to signify in other contexts? Why could it be important here?
As you think about it, hopefully answer choice D is becoming more and more obvious. It’s unlikely that Buzz’s commanders would know for sure he would die when his suit was being created, Buzz is no longer a toy in this movie, we hear and see Buzz being helped by multiple people, and we don’t have enough information to assume that Buzz is the only astronaut capable of flight (especially since we see his friend in a similar space suit at the end of the trailer).
SSAT Inference Practice Question
Now let’s give this same process a try on a sample SSAT passage and question. Read the passage below and make sure you understand the main idea. Then check out the question and return to the passage to hunt for the details that could prove the correct answer choice.
On January 1, 1834, a young man named William escaped from slavery near Cincinnati, Ohio. Traveling at night through the frigid winter, without an overcoat to keep him warm, William suffered from cold and hunger, and yet, as he recorded in the first of many autobiographical narratives, his thoughts were constantly drifting toward the future. “My escape to a land of freedom now appeared certain,” he wrote, “and the prospects of the future occupied a great part of my thoughts. What should be my occupation, was a subject of much anxiety to me; and the next thing what should be my name?” Although his mother had called him “William,” he had, for most of his life, been known as “Sandford” to the series of men who had legally owned him. But now he would be William.
A last name would be trickier to come by. Although William knew the name of the white man who was his biological father, he refused it, claiming “I would rather have adopted the name of ‘Friday,’ and been known as the servant of some Robinson Crusoe, than to have taken his name.” Eventually, fate intervened in the form of a friendly Quaker who took William in when he fell ill. Grateful for the Quaker’s help, William gave him the privilege of choosing a new name: William Wells Brown.
It is most reasonable to infer from the passage that
a. William did not have regular contact with his father
b. William felt sentimentality for the name Sandford
c. William was unwelcome in Cleveland
d. William and his mother were happy together
e. William converted to become a Quaker
You can check your answer at the very bottom of the post.
More SSAT Reading Practice
Want to see this process in action or try out more inference practice questions? Check out our Inferences Youtube video in our SSAT Strategies video series! We’ll walk an SSAT-style passage and continue breaking down these inference questions together.
Answer: A is the correct answer. We can tell this from the evidence, “William knew the name of the white man who was his biological father” and his subsequent refusal of that name. If William had been in regular contact with this father, the author would not need to state that William knew his father’s name; it would be a given. We can eliminate the other answers because there is no evidence to support C, D, or E, and B is contradicted by the fact that William changes his name immediately upon gaining freedom.
