The SAT Prep Black Book(49)
The words “metaphor” and “humor” in an answer choice refer to a non-literal phrase in the passage.
The word “irony” refers to a contradiction.
If you think 2 or more answer choices are equally valid, then you’re overlooking some small detail.
See the many example solutions in this Black Book for demonstrations of these principles.
SAT Sentence Completion
“Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together.”
- William Hazlitt
Overview and Important Reminders for SAT Sentence Completion
When talking about the Reading section of the SAT, most tutors and courses prefer to start with the Sentence Completion questions. This is because most people hold two incorrect beliefs about the SAT Critical Reading section:
oThey think that students will improve significantly if they simply memorize enough vocabulary words, and
othey think that improvement on the Passage-Based Reading questions is impossible for most students, because they don’t realize how those questions work.
But, as usual, we do things differently in the Black Book. You’ll notice that I started with a discussion of Passage-Based Reading questions. There are also two reasons for this:
oThe central concept that we use in solving Passage-Based Reading questions, which is the idea that the correct answer must restate something directly in the passage, still applies to the Sentence Completion questions, and
omany years of experience have taught me that most students have an easier time grasping that idea in the Passage-Based Reading questions than they do in the Sentence Completion questions.
There are two main types of Sentence Completion questions, and they’re very similar to each other. The first type is the Single-Blank question, and the second is the Double-Blank question. The only difference between them is that the first type asks you to fill in one blank, and the second type asks you to fill in two blanks. You use basically the same process to answer either question type, but the two-blank questions sometimes allow room for a little more creativity on your part.
In this section, we’ll go over the ways that natural test-takers find the answers to Sentence Completion questions, including an explanation of why memorizing vocabulary is generally not the best way to prepare.
More importantly, we’ll talk about what you should actually do if you want to improve your performance on these questions.
5 Reasons Why Memorizing Vocabulary Is Not The Best Way To Go
Most students try to approach SAT Sentence Completion questions by memorizing hundreds, or even thousands, of vocabulary words. This is a terrible idea, left over from the days when the SAT had analogies and antonyms on it (it was a terrible idea even then, but it’s an even worse idea now).
Even though there’s a whole industry built around teaching SAT vocabulary to high school students, there are a lot of problems with the idea of cramming vocab in order to raise your SAT score. Let’s take a look at some of them now.
The Questions Are Clearly Not Designed To Test Vocabulary Directly
Because most people never stop to think about the SAT from the College Board’s standpoint, it never dawns on them that the Sentence Completion format is actually a really bad one if you’re trying to evaluate somebody’s vocabulary. If the College Board wanted to measure vocabulary knowledge in the most simple and direct way possible, it could have simply created a question format in which it would provide a single word as the prompt, and then five potential definitions as answer choices, and asked you to select the correct definition for the word in the prompt. That would be a much more direct test of your vocabulary knowledge. Instead, the Sentence Completion format gives you a variety of potential clues and connections to make, both within the sentence and among the answer choices.
Further, most students will find that they know all the necessary words to answer at least half of these questions, and possibly nearly all of them, without feeling like they’re going outside of their comfort zone in terms of vocabulary. Why would the College Board include questions with these kinds of simple words if the goal were purely to test your vocabulary? For that matter, back when the College Board dropped the analogies from this part of the test in 2005, why did they change the name of this section from the “Verbal” section to the “Critical Reading” section? In my opinion, the most likely answer to all of these questions is that the College Board recognizes there’s a lot more going on here than just vocabulary knowledge.
Now, don’t get me wrong: I agree that, all things being equal, it would be more helpful on these questions to have a larger vocabulary than a smaller vocabulary. I also agree that there are sometimes questions (often the last question or two in a page of Sentence Completion questions) that would definitely be easier if you knew all the words in the answer choices.