SAT Prep Black Book: The Most Effective SAT Strategies Ever Published (21 page)

That leaves us with “chicanery.” This is a word that’s probably pretty hard to take apart. But if we’re reasonably confident that the other four answer choices don’t work, and that the first half of this one definitely does work, t
hen I’d go ahead and mark (E) and get the question right.

This, then, is an example of a question that looks pretty challenging at first but can probably ultimately be figured out by reading carefully and paying close attention to the rules of the test and to the
exact
meanings of words.

In this question, we can see that the word in the blank needs to refer to the idea of having “insights . . . beyond ordinary perception.” Many test-takers incorrectly choose (B) for this question because the idea of being a stockbroker seems to be related to the idea of making a profit, but this is yet another example of how important it is to read everything on the SAT very carefully: the word in the blank needs to restate the ideas at the end of the sentence, not the idea of being a stockbroker.

Most students will know the meaning of the word in (A), and will be able to tell that a “mentor” is not necessarily someone who has extra-sensory perception. The same goes for (C): most test-takers will know the word “counterfeit” and will realize that this choice has nothing to do with special insights. (E), as well, is another word that relates to something most test-takers will recognize—in this case, the word “propaganda,” from history classes.

That leaves us with (D), a word we may have a hard time taking apart (students of French will realize that the word means “clear-seeing” in French, which certainly goes along with the idea of having extremely good perception, since sight is one way to perceive things). But, even if we can’t take it apart, we know for sure that the other 4 choices don’t work, and that means (D) must be right.

This is one more excellent example of the general uselessness of memorizing vocabulary words for the majority of Sentence Completion questions. The correct answer here is the word “discriminating,” because the word “discriminating” originally referred to the idea that a person had very good taste and could separate good things from bad things in a way that the average person would not be able to do. (Of course, the more common use of the word “discriminating” today simply refers to the idea of treating people differently based on their race, gender, age, and so on—in that context, it’s obviously not a positive thing.)

I would be willing to bet that most students who approach Sentence Completion questions as an exercise in vocabulary knowledge
would not even bother to memorize the word “discriminating” if they saw it on a list because they would be sure they already knew what it meant. And they would probably end up missing this question as a result.

But if we approach the test correctly, thinking more about the words we know and about the rules of the test rather than simply looking to apply one of the 3,000 oversimplified definitions we might have learned from a flashcard, this question is probably answerable.

We can tell that (A) doesn’t work because the sentence doesn’t refer to the judges as being unknown or difficult to find, which is what “obscure” would mean.

(B) might be a bit more of a challenge for a lot of test-takers, though, because the root of “deferential” might sound an awful lot like the root of “differences” in the text, but there’s a difference between “deferring “ and “differing.” To “defer” something is to put it off for later, while “differing” involves being different. Since the text doesn’t talk about people putting anything off for later, “deferential” isn’t going to be correct.

(D) is a word a lot of test-takers pick because it seems hard to take apart, and because they mistakenly assume that (C) must not be correct. But if we look more carefully, we may see that “sanctimonious” has something like “sanct” for a root, and we may realize that this is similar to the idea of “sanctuary,” a word we might know from political or religious contexts. If we can work that out, we can realize that (D) isn’t the right answer either.

(E) also doesn’t work—if we don’t know this word, we might be able to break it apart and realize the root is “lent,” which has a relationship to the idea of being slow in French and Spanish. But nothing in the sentence is talking about anyone being slow or fast, so this is the wrong answer.

At this point, it would be good for a lot of test-takers to revisit the word “discriminating.” We know that “discrimination” in the more common context involves focusing on differences between people; hopefully, given the fact that the rest of the words don’t work, we can realize that, in the context of evaluating food, the idea of “discriminating” also involves focusing on differences, though of a different type. This makes (C) correct.

This is another example of a question in which most test-takers will try to make an ill-informed guess based on their gut feelings, and be wrong.

The key in this question is the phrase “diametrically opposite.” The word “opposite” goes with the prefix “anti-
” in choice (B), which is how we know that (B) is correct.

Many people will choose (D) or (E) because their prefixes seem to suggest the idea of
two things, but the sentence doesn’t just say that New Zealand and Spain are two different countries—its says they are opposites in some way.

Let me use this question as an opportunity to remind you that it’s extremely important to pay careful attention to these kinds of small details! The people who score in the top 5 or 10 percent on the SAT are not, generally, people who memorize a ton of stuff; instead, they’re people who pay careful attention to the important parts of each question, and who avoid making small mistakes.

This is another question in which paying careful attention to the rules of the test might let us figure out the correct answer even if we don’t know all the words in the answer choices.

The sentence refers to a “sound” being made by a youth orchestra. Note that the word “cacophonous” has the root “phon” in it, which indicates a relationship to the idea of sound in a lot of other words (like “telephone,” “phonics,” and “homophone”). This connection alone might be enough for us to feel certain that (A) is the right answer.

If we want further proof, we should note that the sound causes the members of the orchestra to be
“abashed.” If we can tell that the word “abashed” is probably negative (it might help if we realize it could be related to “bashful”), then we know that the word in the first blank must be a negative word. That would make it impossible for (C) or (D) to be correct.

Some students won’t feel comfortable choosing (A) purely on the strength of the relationship between the root “phon” in the answer choice and the word “sound” in the sentence. But this is the kind of connection we need to start looking out for o
n Sentence Completion questions, because in many cases it can allow us to realize that answers like (A) are correct even if we couldn’t have defined the words in those answers on our own before seeing the question.

This question is one that people miss all the time, even though the people who miss it nearly always know the meanings of every word in the question. This makes it a great example of the types of mistakes people can make because they either don’t know the rules of the SAT or don’t pay careful attention to details.

Because of the College Board’s unwritten rule about parallelism on the Critical Reading section (which we talked about in our discussion on Passage-Based Reading), we can tell that the first blank needs to go with the idea of “light” from earlier in the sentence, and the second blank needs to go with the idea of “insulation.”

So when we pair the word in the first blank with the idea of “incoming sunlight,” it needs to go with the idea of “offer[ing] . . . light” from the beginning of the sentence. The only choice that works for the first blank, then, is (C), because “admit[ting] incoming sunlight” would be a way to “offer . . . light.”

Let’s check out the word in the second blank for (C) to make sure we haven’t made a mistake. We have to ask ourselves this question: is “contain[ing] heat radiated from the ground” the same thing as “offer [ing] . . . insulation”
and “preventing warmth from escaping?” The answer is yes, so we’re sure that (C) is right.

This question is one that some students manage to figure out, but that most students would be better off leaving blank. It’s also a good example of the pitfalls of memorizing vocabulary as an approach to prepping for the SAT.

From the sentence, we can tell that we need a word that means “very sentimental.” (We have to read carefully to figure that out: the sentence says the films are called X, but that they’re not sentimental enough to deserve that. That means that X must be a word that indicates a lot of sentimentality.)

If we don’t know what the word “sentimental” means, then it will be just about impossible to develop a good idea of the answer to this question, and we should definitely skip it.

If we do know the word “sentimental,” then the next challenge is to attack the answer choices.

(A) is a word that most test-takers won’t recognize at all.

(B) looks like it might have some relationship to the word “cursor,”
or to “curse,” but neither of those possibilities would suggest that the word means something related to sentimentality, so this is probably not a correct answer.

(C) looks like it might be related to the word “prose,” which we may recognize from literature class. While some prose is sentimental, it’s certainly not true that all prose is sentimental, so “prosaic” is unlikely to mean “very sentimental.”

(D) is a word that a lot of test-takers know. It’s not related to the idea of being sentimental, so it’s out.

(E) is a difficult word for a lot of people, but if we attack it we may see that it’s probably related to words like “secret” or “sacred,” neither of which is related to being sentimental.

So here’s the situation:
if
we know what “sentimental” means, and
if
we’re able to work out that choices (B), (C), (D), and (E) really don’t seem like they mean “sentimental,” then—
and only then
—we might go ahead and mark (A), and know that we’re correct. But if we don’t know “sentimental” or we can’t quite figure out that the other four words don’t fit—which is the situation I suspect most of us will be in—then this is definitely a question we should skip.

Remember, once more, that the Critical Reading section is fairly forgiving when it comes to these kinds of things. We can still make a perfect score
on the Critical Reading section if we miss one question on most days, and omitting even a half-dozen questions will typically put us right around a 750 out of 800. So this type of question isn’t the thing you should be preparing for unless you’ve already completely mastered every other part of the test; it’s much more important to work on practicing your basic skills so you can make sure to answer every question correctly in which you know enough of the words.

This is a question in which the word we choose for one blank will determine what the other blank needs to mean. (There are always a few questions like this on each test. We haven’t talked about them separately because they don’t require any kind of special treatment or anything.)

This is also a question that a lot of people miss because they don’t pay attention, even though they typically know the meanings of all the necessary words.

In this case, I’d probably start by looking at the options for the second blank, since the word in that blank needs to be something that someone can be “accused” of. We can probably tell that (A), (D), and (E) could work for the second blank, because they’re negative-sounding words. So now we need to see which of those choices has a word for the first blank that fits with the second blank.

A lot of test-takers won’t know the word “vacillated,” so let’s move on to (D). Does it make sense to say that a person “experimented” so much that he was accused of “inflexibility?” No, it really doesn’t—being inflexible means not being open to new things. It has nothing to do with the idea of experiment
ing a lot.

(E) presents a similar problem, even though a lot of test-takers incorrectly choose it. This is
a very good example of how important it is to keep the SAT’s unwritten rules about restatement in mind. In real life, to say that a person “relied so frequently” on prevention that he was accused of “negligence” could almost make sense, especially if there were some context. For example, this sentence would make a lot of sense if it appeared in the middle of a paragraph that was claiming that doctors should know how to cure diseases instead of hoping to prevent them. But we have to remember that the SAT doesn’t allow an answer choice to be correct just because it might result in an interesting sentence. On this part of the SAT, it’s all about restating things, and
relying on disease-prevention is not specifically the same thing as being negligent.
So this is not the correct answer.

Once we figure that out, we can realize that (A) must be the
correct answer. But, again, it all depends on being alert to the rules of the test, and realizing that (E) doesn’t actually work. If we can be very precise when we think about the meanings of the words we know, then we can work out correct answers to a lot of questions that most test-takers will miss.