1. Questions where you don’t know enough of the words to answer with confidence will probably be in the minority, and they don’t count for any more points than any other question on the Critical Reading section.
2. People often miss questions even when vocabulary isn’t an issue, so it’s important to make sure you fix that problem before addressing questions where vocabulary is an issue.
Still, we want to take our best shot at every single question on the test, so it’s important to have strategies in place for dealing with these challenging words, once you’ve perfected your approach to questions where the words aren’t an issue.
Let me say one final thing before we get into these strategies: a certain amount of creative thinking is required to answer Sentence Completion questions with challenging words, at least in the sense that there’s a lot of potential variation from one question to the next. Sometimes a challenging question has one blank, and sometimes it has two; sometimes you’ll have no idea what any of the words mean, and sometimes you’ll have a pretty good idea what most of them mean, and sometimes you’ll know something between those two extremes; sometimes words you don’t know won’t really matter, and sometimes they will; sometimes it will be easier to get an idea of the meaning of an unknown word, and sometimes it will be very difficult, and sometimes it will be downright impossible. And so on.
So you have to go into these situations with a willingness to play around a little bit, and you’ll probably need to spend a little more time with these questions than you would spend on questions where you know enough of the words to be certain of your answers. Keep that in mind.
The Most Important Strategy: Skip What You Don’t Know And Come Back To It
When most test-takers run into Sentence Completion questions where vocabulary is an issue, they groan and stare at the question for a while, hoping something will come to them. This is a natural reaction, but it’s the wrong one. The most important thing you can do in these moments is to skip the question once you realize that you won’t be able to answer it quickly and with confidence.
I’m not saying you skip the question for good. I’m saying you skip it for the moment, and come back to it later. (Maybe you’ll end up skipping it for good anyway, if you still can’t figure it out on your second or third shot.)
The reason for this is pretty simple: Since every question on the Critical Reading section counts for exactly one raw point in the scoring process, there’s no point at all in spending extra time on harder questions when there could be a lot of easier questions for you on the next page.
So remember: when you first open up the Critical Reading section and start in on the Sentence Completion questions, your goal is to complete all the questions you can answer with total confidence as quickly as you possibly can, and to skip all the questions that you can’t answer with total confidence and save them for later, if you have time. There’s no reason to struggle with a hard question when you could be answering easier questions somewhere else.
For the rest of our discussion of challenging Sentence Completion questions, I’m going to assume that you’ve followed this advice about skipping the question on the first time around and coming back to it later.
Now let’s take a look at another important strategy:
We Only Care If A Word Could Be Right. We Don’t Care About Its Exact Meaning.
When we’re trying to answer a Sentence Completion question, we know that the correct answer choice will restate the relevant part of the sentence. It may not seem obvious at first, but knowing this gives us a subtle advantage when we run into challenging words. Unlike other test-takers, we don’t necessarily worry about what the word actually means. Instead, we’re only trying to figure out if the word seems like it could possibly mean what it would need to mean to be the right answer.
For instance, if we had a sentence like “Reginald was so (blank) that he kept jumping for joy,” then we would know that the word in the blank would have to mean something along the lines of “extremely joyful.” If one of the answer choices were “disconsolate,” for example, we might be able to realize that “disconsolate” doesn’t seem to have any features that would suggest that it’s related to being joyful. In that case, we could be pretty sure that “disconsolate” was the wrong answer, even if we didn’t know exactly what it actually meant. (Of course, that might not be enough on its own to tell us what the right answer actually is, but it can often be helpful.)
We’ll see several more examples of this idea as we look at actual SAT questions in the coming pages.