If we want further proof, we should note that the sound causes the members of the orchestra to be “abashed.” If we can tell that the word “abashed” is probably negative (it might help if we realize it could be related to “bashful”), then we know that the word in the first blank must be a negative word. That would make it impossible for (C) or (D) to be correct.
Some students won’t feel comfortable choosing (A) purely on the strength of the relationship between the root “phon” in the answer choice and the word “sound” in the sentence. But this is the kind of connection we need to start looking out for on Sentence Completion questions, because in many cases it can allow us to realize that answers like (A) are correct even if we couldn’t have defined the words in those answers on our own before seeing the question.
Page 576, Question 5
This question is one that people miss all the time, even though the people who miss it nearly always know the meanings of every word in the question. This makes it a great example of the types of mistakes people can make because they either don’t know the rules of the SAT or don’t pay careful attention to details.
Because of the College Board’s unwritten rule about parallelism on the Critical Reading section (which we talked about in our discussion on Passage-Based Reading), we can tell that the first blank needs to go with the idea of “light” from earlier in the sentence, and the second blank needs to go with the idea of “insulation.”
So when we pair the word in the first blank with the idea of “incoming sunlight,” it needs to go with the idea of “offer[ing] . . . light” from the beginning of the sentence. The only choice that works for the first blank, then, is (C), because “admit[ting] incoming sunlight” would be a way to “offer . . . light.”
Let’s check out the word in the second blank for (C) to make sure we haven’t made a mistake. We have to ask ourselves this question: is “contain[ing] heat radiated from the ground” the same thing as “offer [ing] . . . insulation” and “preventing warmth from escaping?” The answer is yes, so we’re sure that (C) is right.
Page 576, Question 8
This question is one that some students manage to figure out, but that most students would be better off leaving blank. It’s also a good example of the pitfalls of memorizing vocabulary as an approach to prepping for the SAT.
From the sentence, we can tell that we need a word that means “very sentimental.” (We have to read carefully to figure that out: the sentence says the films are called X, but that they’re not sentimental enough to deserve that. That means that X must be a word that indicates a lot of sentimentality.)
If we don’t know what the word “sentimental” means, then it will be just about impossible to develop a good idea of the answer to this question, and we should definitely skip it.
If we do know the word “sentimental,” then the next challenge is to attack the answer choices.
(A) is a word that most test-takers won’t recognize at all.
(B) looks like it might have some relationship to the word “cursor,” or to “curse,” but neither of those possibilities would suggest that the word means something related to sentimentality, so this is probably not a correct answer.
(C) looks like it might be related to the word “prose,” which we may recognize from literature class. While some prose is sentimental, it’s certainly not true that all prose is sentimental, so “prosaic” is unlikely to mean “very sentimental.”
(D) is a word that a lot of test-takers know. It’s not related to the idea of being sentimental, so it’s out.
(E) is a difficult word for a lot of people, but if we attack it we may see that it’s probably related to words like “secret” or “sacred,” neither of which is related to being sentimental.
So here’s the situation: if we know what “sentimental” means, and if we’re able to work out that choices (B), (C), (D), and (E) really don’t seem like they mean “sentimental,” then—and only then—we might go ahead and mark (A), and know that we’re correct. But if we don’t know “sentimental” or we can’t quite figure out that the other four words don’t fit—which is the situation I suspect most of us will be in—then this is definitely a question we should skip.
Remember, once more, that the Critical Reading section is fairly forgiving when it comes to these kinds of things. We can still make a perfect score on the Critical Reading section if we miss one question on most days, and omitting even a half-dozen questions will typically put us right around a 750 out of 800. So this type of question isn’t the thing you should be preparing for unless you’ve already completely mastered every other part of the test; it’s much more important to work on practicing your basic skills so you can make sure to answer every question correctly in which you know enough of the words.