But let’s back up a little bit. The words “actually” and “though” indicate that some contradictory ideas will be presented here. The phrase “for several minutes” near the end of the sentence indicates that the first half of the sentence will be talking about something happening in one instant (since the first half of the sentence contradicts the last half).
So let’s take a look at our remaining choices for words in the first blank. (B) doesn’t offer anything to do with the idea of the opposite of “several minutes.” (C) gives us a word related to the idea of time, but it’s still not actually relevant to the sentence—one more example of why it’s so important to read carefully and think carefully. Being “temporar[y]” has nothing to do with whether something occurs quickly or spread out over several minutes. (D) doesn’t work for the first blank, either. (E) does—in fact, it has the word “instant” right in the beginning of it.
So let’s take a look at the other half of (E) to make sure we haven’t made a mistake. “Onset” works nicely in the sentence, and restates the idea of when the “sleep actually occurs.” So we can tell that (E) must be correct.
There’s one more thing I’d like to point out about this question. You may recall that I said I was against “pre-forming” answers to Sentence Completion questions, even though the strategy is widely recommended in many other sources. In this particular question, though, I pointed out that we were probably looking for a word that would mean something like “in one instant,” and then the correct answer ended up including the word “instantaneously.” So it might seem like pre-forming worked out for me here. But I wasn’t actually pre-forming an answer to this question, because part of the pre-forming strategy is that you decide what the correct answer should look like beforehand and then go through the choices and try to find a word that matches your preconceived notion. I didn’t do that: I considered each answer choice on its own as I came to it, and it just happened coincidentally that the correct answer sounded similar to something I thought about when I was explaining what the question looked like to me.
It’s not uncommon for something like this to happen, especially as you develop more familiarity with the test, but it’s very important that you never actually get in the habit of insisting that an answer choice include a certain word beforehand. Sometimes we misread sentences, or sometimes there might be more than one part of a sentence that a blank could restate, or sometimes a blank might be restating a word in another blank in the same sentence, or who knows what. It’s important to sit back and let the sentence come to you, rather than trying to force the sentence to say something that it doesn’t actually say.
Page 853, Question 4
A lot of test-takers incorrectly choose “nondescript” for this question because the sentence describes people who “neither spoke nor smiled.” But, as always, it’s important to think carefully about what these words actually mean.
“Nondescript” means that something has no particular description, as we can probably tell from the word itself. But the sentence actually describes the auditors: it describes them by saying that they “neither spoke nor smiled.” So (E) doesn’t actually work.
Let’s try the other words. (A) certainly doesn’t work. (B) is a word that often describes auditors in general, because people who choose to become auditors are typically motivated by their ethics, but the sentence itself doesn’t say anything about ethics, so (B) is wrong. (C) is related to the word “glacier,” which might not seem to be related. And (D) definitely doesn’t work, because you have to speak to “taunt” someone.
So now what?
Well, if we’re pretty sure that all 5 answers are wrong, there’s only one possible conclusion: we made a mistake somewhere. So let’s go back over our assumptions and see if we can figure out what we did wrong.
(A) definitely means “friendly,” since we can recognize “ami” right at the beginning of it, which means “friend” in French and is similar to “amigo” in Spanish or “amicus” in Latin.
(B) definitely refers to ethics, which isn’t relevant here.
What about (C)? We might realize at this point that glaciers are very cold things, and that the attitude of the auditors could certainly be called cold. It’s also imaginable that a glacier might be intimidating. Could it be that when the word “glacial” is applied to a person it means that the person is cold and imposing, like a glacier?