The SAT Prep Black Book(56)

Keep this in mind as you practice the rest of the strategies in this section, and as you take the test. You’re not necessarily trying to figure out what a word actually means; you’re just trying to figure out if it could possibly mean what it needs to mean in order to be the right answer.





Don’t Be Afraid Of Different Forms Of A Familiar Word


Many times I’ve had students who are afraid to make small logical leaps when figuring out what words mean, often because they’ve been taught (incorrectly) that they shouldn’t make those leaps.

As an example, I once had a student who knew the meaning of the word “therapy,” but didn’t feel like he knew the meaning of the word “therapist.” I asked him if he knew what the suffix “-ist” meant, in words like “pianist” or “receptionist.” He said he did. When I said, “So does it seem like a ‘therapist’ might be somebody who does something related to therapy, just as a ‘pianist’ does something related to pianos and a ‘receptionist’ does something related to receiving people?” He said, “I guess so. I mean, I thought of that, but I wasn’t sure.”

I’m telling you that you can go ahead and make those assumptions safely, no matter what your teachers may have told you in the past. If you know how a suffix works, and that suffix is attached to a word that looks like something else you know, then you can be fairly certain that the meaning of the word is essentially what it would seem to be based on its parts. There are occasional exceptions to this, of course, but remember that we’re not trying to figure out exactly what a word means. We’re just trying to figure out if it could possibly mean what it needs to mean in order to be the right answer to the question.

This leads me to a more general word-deciphering strategy:





Break Words Into Syllables And Attack From Right To Left


I have said, repeatedly, that the Sentence Completion questions on the SAT aren’t purely about memorizing vocabulary. One of the major pieces of evidence supporting this conclusion is the fact that the College Board frequently uses “challenging” words that involve multiple syllables and/or have some connection to Latin, French, or Spanish words that many test-takers may be slightly familiar with. (Of course, there will be some challenging words on the SAT that don’t have these characteristics, and this particular strategy may not be very useful on those words.)

So we want to get in the habit of breaking unknown words into their syllables, so we can try to get a better idea of how they’re put together and whether they might be appropriate answers for our Sentence Completion questions.

When we break the words apart, we want to consider their components in the following order: first the suffixes, then the roots, and finally the prefixes. We want to go backwards, in a sense.

This might seem odd, but there’s a good reason for it. The suffix (if there is one) is the most easily identifiable and reliable component of most words, and the prefix (if there is one) is usually the least reliable component of the word.

For thorough examples of how this idea works in the context of real SAT questions, you’ll want to take a look at the sample solutions that appear a little later in this book. But for now, let’s consider a few imaginary examples, just for practice.

Imagine that one of our answer choices includes the word “indefatigable.” In this case, we might be able to break the word up and realize the following:

othe suffix seems to be “-able”

othe root seems to be something like “fatig”

othe prefix seems to be either “inde,” or a combination of “in-” and “de-”

From here, we might be able to figure out that this word has something to do with the idea of whether something can have a certain action done to it, because of the suffix “-able.” (Along similar lines, the word “forgettable” means something can be forgotten, and the word “understandable” means something can be understood.) The action in question seems to have something to do with the idea of “fatigue,” or being tired. And the prefixes might indicate a double opposite, or they might not; it’s hard to tell with these prefixes. “In-” sometimes indicates an opposite (as in “insincere”) and sometimes indicates reinforcement (as in “intense”). “De-” sometimes indicates an opposite, but not always (the word “defend” is not the opposite of the word “fend,” for instance). So we wouldn’t know for sure what this word meant just from taking it apart, but we might be able to tell it has something to do with the idea of whether something can be fatigued, and that might be enough for us to figure out whether the word has anything to do with the sentence in the question.