The SAT Prep Black Book(62)

So now let’s look at the other choices, and see if we can find some words that could work in the first blank. Industries can be “transformed” or “revolutionized,” and maybe even “stimulated.” It sounds a little odd to talk about “provok[ing]” an industry, though.

Now let’s consider the other words in choices (B), (C), and (E).

For (B), we might not know what “viable” means, so let’s skip it for the moment.

(C) doesn’t quite work. Even if we don’t know “prohibitive,” we probably know words like “prohibited” and “prohibition,” so we can tell that “prohibitive” has to do with making something difficult or impossible. That doesn’t go with the idea of things being “inexpensive” from the early part of the sentence.

(E) doesn’t work either, for the same reason—nothing in the sentence talks about making it harder to access anything.

So now we can tell that (B) is correct, especially if we know what “viable” means, or if we can realize it might be related to words like “vive” in French or “viva” in Spanish, which have to do with living or surviving.

Let this question remind you that you always have to pay attention to small details on the SAT. People choose (A) all the time on this question because they don’t check the details. For most people, missing this question isn’t a matter of vocabulary—it’s a matter of not following the rules of the test.





Page 402, Question 8


This is a question that many people will probably choose to skip. We want a word that means “disloyal,” but most students will be very unfamiliar with every word in the answer choices except, perhaps, “tenacity,” which isn’t the right answer. These particular words will also be fairly hard to take apart in terms of roots and suffixes. It also doesn’t help that the first four answer choices are all negative-sounding words, which makes it hard to eliminate any of them.

So, again, the best thing for most test-takers to do is to skip this question, unless you just happen to know the word “perfidy” for some reason and can tell that choice (C) is correct.

Why am I talking about this question, then?

This question is the kind of thing most people think about when they think about the Critical Reading section of the SAT: a question with difficult, obscure words, and very little context. But this question is actually pretty abnormal, if you compare it to the rest of the questions in the section. The only other question in the whole section that might have similarly difficult words with so little context is number 7, but the remaining 22 questions in the section are nothing like those two.

If you skip 7 and 8, but lock down the other questions on the section, including questions like 6, by paying attention to details with words you actually know—and if you maintain a similar pace on the other two Critical Reading sections—you’ll have a score above 700.

So the reason I wanted to talk about this question is to reiterate that it’s not the sort of thing you should be focusing on in your SAT preparation. There’s much more useful stuff we can learn from questions like number 6 on the same page, and there are many opportunities on the Critical Reading section to answer more questions with less effort in the amount of time we might spend trying to answer this one.





Page 425, Question 5


Lots of test-takers incorrectly choose (D) here. Their reasoning is usually something like this: “Well, I can imagine that it might be possible for some luxurious fabric to be really thin and transparent, so I guess ‘luxurious’ is a good answer—plus, I know what it means.”

But remember that we can’t just pick an answer because we know what it means. We have to check and make sure it’s appropriate to the sentence.

In this case, the word “luxurious” simply does not mean “basically transparent.” It’s true that some luxurious things might be transparent, and some transparent things might be luxurious, but the two terms are not identical. So (D) is wrong.

Now, what about the other choices?

Many test-takers can figure out that (C) probably has something to do with the idea of variation, and that it’s irrelevant to the sentence.

We may also recognize that (E) is related to the word “anomaly,” which is also not appropriate here.

(A) is a bit more of a reach for most people. If we can figure out that (A) is related to the idea of being able to touch or feel something, then we can tell that it must not be correct.

That would allow us to know that (B) must be right, since the other four answers are wrong. We could work this out even if we can’t figure out anything about (B) on its own.