The SAT Prep Black Book(60)

For most people, then, skipping this question will ultimately be the best option.





Page 390, Question 4


This is a classic example of a question that untrained test-takers miss all the time, even though they typically know all the necessary words to find the right answer. For most students who get this question wrong, the major issues will be the grammatical complexity of the sentence and the difficulty posed by the word “visceral.”

The key thing here, as always, is to read very carefully, and to remember that all questions in the Critical Reading section of the SAT rely on the idea of restating concepts exactly.

The phrase “that is” in the last line of the sentence indicates that everything after the comma is a restatement of everything before the semicolon. In other words, if we call the first blank “X” and the second blank “Y,” the fact that it was “visceral . . . rather than X” is the same thing as the fact that it was “not . . . rational [but] Y.”

Let’s keep that in mind as we work through this.

For most people, the easiest place to start will be with the second blank, because we can tell that the word in the second blank needs to be the opposite of the word “rational.” The second word in choice (A), though, is a synonym for “rational,” so it won’t work. The second word in choice (B) is unrelated to the idea of being rational, so it won’t work either. (C), on the other hand, offers an antonym of “rational” in its second blank, so it’s okay; (D) works too. (E) offers another synonym of “rational,” so it’s out.

So we can tell that (C) and (D) are the only two choices that offer antonyms of the word “rational” for their second blanks. Now we have to figure out whether “intuitive” or “deliberate” is the right option for the first blank.

We can see that the first blank needs to be the opposite of the word “visceral,” but a lot of test-takers won’t know what the word “visceral” means. It might look like we’re stuck . . . until we remember that the last part of the sentence is a restatement of the first part, as we discussed above.

So the word in the first blank isn’t just the opposite of “visceral.” It must also be the same thing as “rational”! We know that because the first half of the sentence says the decision was “visceral” instead of the word in the first blank, and then the rest of the sentence says the decision wasn’t “rational.” So “rational” and the word in the first blank must be synonyms, because of the College Board’s unwritten rules about things in Sentence Completion questions restating each other.

We probably know that the word “intuitive” refers to something being a gut feeling, while the word “deliberate” refers to something that is carefully considered, or “rational.” So, out of these two options, we want the word “deliberate” for the first blank. That makes (D) the right answer.

Remember that reading carefully and knowing the rules for these questions is more important than memorizing a lot of vocabulary words! Also remember that you can often work around difficult words, just like we could work around the word “visceral” in this question.

This kind of question is the sort of thing you want to focus on during your preparation and testing, rather than something like number 3 on the same page, because the technique that we use to reason through this question will be broadly applicable on all Sentence Completion questions, while the strange words in a question like 3 will probably never appear in positions that matter when you take the test for real.





Page 390, Question 5


This question is a great example of the type of thing that most test-takers will miss, even if they’ve memorized a ton of vocabulary, because the words in the answer choices are fairly obscure and the grammar of the sentence is more complex than usual.

But a well-trained test-taker can easily take this question apart and find the right answer in seconds.

The question talks about the idea of a “transformation” that results in the destruction of something. From years of experience with many, many students, I know that most people will have a difficult time with nearly all the words in these answer choices, with the possible exception of the words in choice (D). In fact, people often make the mistake of choosing (D) just because they know what those words mean, even though “innovation” is definitely a positive idea and the word in the second blank definitely needs to be negative (since it “destroyed” good things like “adaptability”). Let this question be one more reminder of the fact that you shouldn’t pick a choice just because you know what the words mean—they have to mean the right things in the context of the question in order to be right!