SAT Prep Black Book: The Most Effective SAT Strategies Ever Published (20 page)

Believe it or not, we can be sure (
C) is right if we simply realize that “innovation” doesn’t work and that (C) is the only other choice with two words that could describe a transformation. We don’t even need to know what those words mean.

Now, let me be very clear that this exact type of solution will not be possible on every single Sentence Completion question, for the reasons I described earlier in this section: the College Board uses a wide variety of sentence
structures and a wide variety of words, so we have to be flexible in our solutions. Sometimes we’ll look at a question with a lot of unknown words and there just won’t be anything we can do. But sometimes we’ll be able to work out the question mostly by reading carefully and paying attention to suffixes, and that’s what happened here.

This might feel like a strange, unreliable way of answering SAT questions. If it seems that way to you, it means you’re still thinking as a traditional, cramming-oriented test-taker. Just loosen up a little bit and try using these techniques in practice. After a few questions they’ll begin to feel much more natural.

It will probably help to check out
www.SATprepVideos.com
, where a selection of free videos is available for readers of this book.

In order to help that process along, let’s take a look throughout the rest of the College Board’s book at some other test items that students have often had questions about.

Now let’s talk about some solutions for the SAT Sentence Completion questions that people typically have difficulties with. As always, you’ll need a copy of the College Board’s Blue Book to follow along.

I strongly advise you to follow along with these solutions as a way to continue to improve your performance on Sentence Completion questions.

This is a two-blank question that a lot of students miss because they don’t bother to consider their answer in the context of the original sentence. Most people who miss this question choose (A), because the idea of “cheapen[ing]” something seems to fit nicely in the sentence for the first blank, and “affordable” definitely works for the second blank.

The problem, though, is that it doesn’t make sense to say that the new method “cheapened” an “industry.” A product might have been cheapened, but the industry as a whole can’t technically be cheapened—the industry doesn’t have a price that could be lowered, which is what “cheapening” would have to mean in this context.

If we go back to the original sentence and imagine saying it with the word “cheapened” in place of the first blank, we can probably feel right away that it’s odd to talk about an “industry” being “cheapened.” But, again, a lot of students don’t catch this mistake because they don’t take the time necessary to go back and fit the word back in the sentence to make sure it’s correct.

So now let’s look at the other choices, and see if we can find some words that could work in the first blank. Industries can be “transformed” or “revolutionized,” and maybe even “stimulated.” It sounds a little odd to talk about “provok[ing]” an industry, though.

Now let’s consider the other words in choices (B), (C), and (E).

For (B), we might not know what “viable” means, so let’s skip it for the moment.

(C) doesn’t quite work. Even if we don’t know “prohibitive,” we probably know words like “prohibited” and “prohibition,” so we can tell that “prohibitive” has to do with making something difficult or impossible. That doesn’t go with the idea of things being “inexpensive” from the early part of the sentence.

(E) doesn’t work either, for the same reason—nothing in the sentence talks about making it harder to access anything.

So now
we can tell that (B) is correct, especially if we know what “viable” means, or if we can realize it might be related to words like “vive” in French or “viva” in Spanish, which have to do with living or surviving.

Let this question remind you that you always have to pay attention to small details on the SAT. People choose (A) all the time on this question because they don’t check the details. For most people, missing this question isn’t a matter of vocabulary—it’s a matter of not following the rules of the test.

This is a question that many people will probably choose to skip. We want a word that means “disloyal,” but most students will be very unfamiliar with every word in the answer choices except, perhaps, “tenacity,” which isn’t the right answer. These particular words will also be fairly hard to take apart in terms of roots and suffixes. It also doesn’t help that the first four answer choices are all negative-sounding words, which makes it hard to eliminate any of them.

So, again, the best thing for most test-takers to do is to skip this question, unless you just happen to know the word “perfidy” for some reason and can tell that choice (C) is correct.

Why am I talking about
this question, then?

This question is the kind of thing most people think about when they think about the Critical Reading section of the SAT
: a question with difficult, obscure words, and very little context. But this question is actually pretty abnormal, if you compare it to the rest of the questions in the section. The only other question in the whole section that might have similarly difficult words with so little context is number 7, but the remaining 22 questions in the section are nothing like those two.

If you skip 7 and 8, but lock down
the other questions on the section, including questions like 6, by paying attention to details with words you actually know—and if you maintain a similar pace on the other two Critical Reading sections—you’ll have a score above 700.

So the reason I wanted to talk about this question is to reiterate that it’s not the sort of thing you should be focusing on in your SAT preparation. There’s much more useful stuff we can learn from questions
like number 6 on the same page, and there are many opportunities on the Critical Reading section to answer more questions with less effort in the amount of time we might spend trying to answer this one.

Lots of test-takers incorrectly choose (D) here. Their reasoning is usually something like this: “Well, I can imagine that it might be possible for some luxurious fabric to be really thin and transparent, so I guess ‘luxurious’ is a good answer—plus, I know what it means.”

But remember that we can’t just pick an answer because we know what it
means. We have to check and make sure it’s appropriate to the sentence.

In this case, the word “luxurious” simply does not mean “basically transparent.” It’s true that
some
luxurious things might be transparent, and
some
transparent things might be luxurious, but the two terms are not identical. So (D) is wrong.

Now, what about the other choices?

Many test-takers can figure out that (C) probably has something to do with the idea of variation, and that it’s irrelevant to the sentence.

We may also recognize that (E) is related to the word “anomaly,” which is also not appropriate here.

(A) is a bit more of a reach for most people. If we can figure out that (A) is related to the idea of being able to touch or feel something, then we can tell that it must not be correct.

That would allow us to know that (B) must be right, s
ince the other four answers are wrong. We could work this out even if we can’t figure out anything about (B) on its own.

But if we can’t figure out that (A) doesn’t work, or if we don’t recognize that (E) doesn’t work, then we should probably skip this question.

No matter what, though, we shouldn’t pick “luxurious.” We know it’s not the same as the word “transparent.”

In this question, we want a word that relates to the idea of being “unpredictable” and “given to . . . shifting moods.”

Many of the answer choices will be hard for a lot of test-takers to figure out, but let’s give them a try.

(A) probably reminds us of the word “mercury,” or possibly the planet of the same name. If you’ve ever studied the element mercury in school, you know that it behaves very oddly and is often an exception to a lot of chemical trends. But let’s leave that aside for a moment.

(B) is a word you might recognize from warning labels on household cleaners, or on the sides of trucks on the highway.
Neither context really involves something being unpredictable.

(C) is a word we can probably take apart. Its root seems to be related to the idea of being genuine, and the “
dis-“ and “in-” prefixes could possibly indicate a few different things (as we noted earlier, prefixes are often less reliable than other parts of a word). But the idea of being genuine probably also doesn’t have much to do with the idea of being “unpredictable.”

(D) looks like it would mean something along the lines of “unable to be placed” or “unable to be placated.” But neither of those possibilities seems like it would mean the same thing as being “unpredictable” or “constantly shifting.”

(E) is a tough word for a lot of people to recognize on paper, though many people say the root of this word out loud when they get sick. The root is “phlegm,” pronounced “flem,” as in the gunk that can coat your lungs when you’re sick. If we can recognize the pronunciation from the spelling, we can probably also tell that nothing about the word “phlegm” specifically involves the idea of being predictable or not.

So if we can put all of that together, we can see that (A) might make sense, while the other answers don’t. In that case, we go ahead and mark (A)
, and get the question right. But if we end up being stuck with a few answer choices feeling unresolved, then we leave the question blank—remember that we can omit a half-dozen Critical Reading questions on most test days and still score above a 700 on that section of the SAT.

As we’ve discussed, we’re supposed to realize that, in SAT code, the first blank will mean the same thing as “brief,” and that the second blank will mean “instructive.”

Many people incorrectly choose (B) for this one because they
realize that “concise” works great for the first blank without noticing that “elaborate” doesn’t mean the same thing as “instructive” for the second blank.

It’s true that there might be some things that are both “instructive” and “elaborate,” but the two words are not synonymous—not all “instructive” things are “elaborate.” Some are quite simple.

(D) is the correct option here because “succinct” is a synonym for “brief” and “enlightening” is a synonym for “instructive.”

Let this question serve as one more reminder of the fact that it’s very important to pay careful attention to every detail, especially on questions where you know what the words mean!
I’ve talked to a lot of people who incorrectly chose (B) for this question, and every single one of them knew what “elaborate” and “instructive” meant, but let themselves pick (B) anyway. Don’t do that.

This is a difficult question for a lot of test-takers, and many of them choose to answer it incorrectly rather than leave it blank.

From the structure of the sentence and our knowledge of the SAT’s rules, we can tell that the word in the blank needs to restate the idea of being “preoccup[ied] with daily life in rural and agricultural settings.”

Many people choose (B) because they know that the word “prolific” is something that can be applied to writers or other artists who produce a large volume of work. But that word doesn’t fit here, because we’re looking for a word to describe the actual
novels
, and novels can’t produce large volumes of work. (On top of that, the sentence doesn’t say anything about producing a lot of work anyway.)

(E) might also be attractive to people who don’t pay close enough attention to detail, and for the same reason. It’s true that metaphors are related to the idea of literature, but “metaphorical” doesn’t mean the same thing as being interested in “rural and
agricultural settings,” which is what the right answer needs to mean.

The words in (A), (C), and (D) might be a little harder to deal with, though, and this is why I’d recommend that most test-takers skip this question and invest their energy in other questions, where it would be more likely to pay off. These 3 words will be hard to take apart, and most test-takers will be left guessing and probably losing points.

Of course, if we happen to know the word “bucolic,” we’ll know that (A) is correct. But most test-takers won’t know that word—and, even if you do know it, the chances that it will be helpful on a future SAT question are practically zero.

(Many people who prep in the traditional way will see this question and decide they need to learn the words “bucolic,” “lugubrious,” and “sundry.” But the odds are very small that you would ever see those words again in a position on the SAT that actually matters. If you want to learn those words to further your own education, that’s a different story, of course. Just don’t expect them to make a difference when you take the test for real.)

Unlike the previous question, this is one that most test-takers should invest their time and energy in, because it’s a question we can probably answer correctly by reading carefully and relying on the meanings of words we know.

From reading the sentence carefully and remembering the rules of the SAT, we can tell that the word in the first blank needs to mean “foolish.” The word in the second blank needs to mean something that a person could be “accuse[d]” of for applying “skewed data.”

For the first blank, then, (A), (B), and (E) might all seem like good ideas. That means we need to figure out whether “remonstrance,” “erudition,” or “chicanery” might be the best option for the second blank, the thing that somebody would be accused of for applying skewed data.

If we know the meanings of those words, the answer is pretty clear. But let’s assume that we don’t, and attack the words to try to figure out what they might mean.

“Remonstrance” looks like it might have a meani
ng similar to “demonstration,” since both words seem to have a prefix stuck on the root “monstr.” (We might also wonder if the word is related to “monster,” but, even if it is, it wouldn’t have anything to do with applying skewed data.)

For “erudition,”
we might see a connection to the ides of “rudeness,” or of something being “rudimentary.” “Rudeness” does seem like something that a person could be accused of, so it might look tempting, but the sentence says that a person would be accused of rudeness
because he “appl[ied] skewed data,”
and that doesn’t really work, unfortunately—the word “rude” applies to somebody who does something impolite, not to somebody who applies bad data.