In fact, I’ve seen it happen many times that a well-trained test-taker ends up choosing a correct answer to a question even though he doesn’t know what it means, because he’s been able to figure out that all the other answer choices don’t work for one reason or another.
When you run into a situation where you know the meanings of some words but not all of them, you should start by considering the words you know and determining if they restate elements of the sentence. If they do, you’re in luck—you must have the right answer. But if they don’t restate part of the sentence, then you should simply eliminate them and set to work trying to figure something out about the remaining answer choices. That’s all you can do in that situation, unfortunately. You shouldn’t try to rationalize putting down a wrong answer just because you’re comfortable with the word itself if it doesn’t actually restate part of the sentence.
And here’s one last important strategy I wanted to mention. You won’t see it on the test too much, but it can make a real difference whenever it does come up.
Don’t Rule Out A Word Based On Its Part Of Speech
Although I don’t believe the College Board ever comes out and says so directly, all of the options for a particular blank will always be the same part of speech. They’re either all nouns, or they’re all verbs, or they’re all adjectives, or whatever.
Many students are unaware of this rule, and they’ll sometimes reject a correct answer because they think it can only be a noun when it needs to be a verb. But the College Board doesn’t try to trick us in this way. When you’re looking at an answer choice, don’t worry about whether you’re familiar with every possible part of speech the word might be. Instead, just think about what the word means, and whether that idea restates another idea in the sentence. Trust that the College Board isn’t trying to mislead you by giving you a word that’s the wrong part of speech.
The Sentence Completion Process in Action Against Real Questions
By this point, we’ve seen the process for answering questions when we know enough of the words to be sure we’re right, and we’ve talked about some general strategies we can try to follow in situations where we don’t know enough of the words right away to be certain that we’re right.
Now it’s time to take all of these abstract concepts and apply them to some concrete questions from the College Board’s Blue Book, The Official SAT Study Guide. As I said earlier and will say again (often), the Blue Book is the only substantial printed source of real SAT questions that were actually written by the College Board, which means it is the only substantial source of questions that are guaranteed to follow all the same rules and patterns that the SAT will follow when you take it for real.
You can find the best deal on the Blue Book here: http://www.SATprepBlackBook.com/blue-book.
First, we’ll do the Sentence Completion questions from page 390 in the second edition of the College Board’s Official SAT Study Guide, since that’s the first set of Sentence Completion questions from the first practice test in that book. Then, we’ll go through a selection of questions from the Blue Book that students have traditionally had difficulty with, so that you can see the strategies in action in a variety of situations.
To show that we don’t need to know all the words on the SAT, I’ll proceed as though we don’t know some of the words in various questions, when my experience with students would suggest that those words might not be widely known by most test-takers.
Page 390, Question 1
This is a single-blank question in which many students will be able to recognize that the word “foresight” restates the idea of “accurately predict[ing]” something. We can see that the word “predict” has the prefix “pre-” in it, which typically indicates something happening in advance of something else; we can also see that the word “foresight” has the prefix “fore-,” which also indicates the idea of something being before something else. So (A) is correct.
Some students get nervous on this question because they aren’t sure about the words “nostalgia” and “folly,” but there’s no need to worry about them if we’re sure that “foresight” is correct. If you know that one answer choice restates the correct part of the sentence, then it doesn’t matter what the other choices mean: the College Board will never create a question in which two answer choices accurately restate the relevant parts of the sentence.
Some students are also drawn to the word “despair,” because it seems to them like a writer would probably be sad if his books weren’t allowed to appear in his native country. But we have to remember that we’re not just looking for an okay-sounding sentence; we specifically need a word that restates part of the existing sentence. “Despair” doesn’t satisfy that criterion because the sentence doesn’t actually say anything about being extremely sad or upset.