Page 587, Question 4
This is a question in which the word we choose for one blank will determine what the other blank needs to mean. (There are always a few questions like this on each test. We haven’t talked about them separately because they don’t require any kind of special treatment or anything.)
This is also a question that a lot of people miss because they don’t pay attention, even though they typically know the meanings of all the necessary words.
In this case, I’d probably start by looking at the options for the second blank, since the word in that blank needs to be something that someone can be “accused” of. We can probably tell that (A), (D), and (E) could work for the second blank, because they’re negative-sounding words. So now we need to see which of those choices has a word for the first blank that fits with the second blank.
A lot of test-takers won’t know the word “vacillated,” so let’s move on to (D). Does it make sense to say that a person “experimented” so much that he was accused of “inflexibility?” No, it really doesn’t—being inflexible means not being open to new things. It has nothing to do with the idea of experimenting a lot.
(E) presents a similar problem, even though a lot of test-takers incorrectly choose it. This is a very good example of how important it is to keep the SAT’s unwritten rules about restatement in mind. In real life, to say that a person “relied so frequently” on prevention that he was accused of “negligence” could almost make sense, especially if there were some context. For example, this sentence would make a lot of sense if it appeared in the middle of a paragraph that was claiming that doctors should know how to cure diseases instead of hoping to prevent them. But we have to remember that the SAT doesn’t allow an answer choice to be correct just because it might result in an interesting sentence. On this part of the SAT, it’s all about restating things, and relying on disease-prevention is not specifically the same thing as being negligent. So this is not the correct answer.
Once we figure that out, we can realize that (A) must be the correct answer. But, again, it all depends on being alert to the rules of the test, and realizing that (E) doesn’t actually work. If we can be very precise when we think about the meanings of the words we know, then we can work out correct answers to a lot of questions that most test-takers will miss.
Page 587, Question 5
This is yet another example of a question that test-takers can often attack successfully even without knowing what all the words mean, provided they read carefully and follow the rules of the test.
First, let’s start with a careful reading of the sentence itself. (This is always important, but it’s especially worth mentioning in this sentence because this one is a bit more complicated than most of them will be.) We can tell that the word in the first blank needs to mean something like “depict[ing] both the strengths and weaknesses” and “avoiding . . . extremes.” The word in the second blank needs to be the opposite of “indictment”—we know this because of the phrase “two extremes,” which indicates that the next blank must be the opposite of “indictment” (otherwise there would be only one extreme, mentioned twice). If we’re alert to the College Board’s unwritten rules, we know that the second blank goes with the idea of “depict[ing] strengths,” just as “indictment” must go with the idea of “depict[ing] . . . weaknesses.”
So let’s start with the first blank. Based on what we’ve just figured out, (A) might seem like a good option for the first blank initially, but there’s a problem with it. If something is “polarized,” then it involves the idea of two polar opposites or extremes, but the second half of the sentence talks about “avoiding . . . extremes.” So if we read carefully, (A) actually doesn’t work, even though (A) is the choice test-takers usually go with when they get the question wrong.
As always, it’s important to think about exactly what words mean, and exactly what the text says.
(B) doesn’t work either, because the idea of being imaginative has nothing to do with the idea of “depict[ing] strengths and weaknesses.”
(C) has a word for the first blank that most test-takers won’t recognize, so let’s come back to it.
(D) doesn’t work because it would only involve depicting strengths.
(E) might be another unknown word, but perhaps we can realize that the root “equi” probably indicates the idea of equality, which could be related to the idea of showing both the good and the bad.