Sure, why not? Given the circumstances, “glacial” must be correct.
This especially makes sense when we consider that the other 4 words are all clearly wrong.
Sometimes we have to go back and revisit our assumptions. There’s nothing wrong with that—it’s just smart test-taking. As always, careful reading and careful thinking are much more powerful than memorizing vocabulary—the people who miss this question don’t miss it because they don’t know the word “nondescript,” or because they don’t know what a glacier is. They miss it because they aren’t paying attention to details.
Page 853, Question 6
This is a question that many test-takers will probably end up skipping, because high school students often lack familiarity with financial terms and this question can quickly turn into a dead-end without that familiarity. Still, we might be able to work our way through it.
In this question, we need a word for the second blank that could indicate some kind of cash award coming in the form of a loan. We may be able to recognize that (A) and (C) offer workable options for the second word. But what about the first word?
If we think carefully, we may realize that a “rebate” can only be given after something has been bought—you’ve probably heard commercials for car dealerships where new buyers are promised a rebate. The sentence doesn’t say anything about the museum buying anything, so (C) doesn’t actually work.
But a lot of students may not trust the word “reprieve” in choice (A). A “reprieve” is a chance to be let out of doing something, let off the hook. That works here because the sentence talks about the museum being “on the verge of . . . collapse.”
So if we can figure out that (C) doesn’t quite work, and if we have the confidence to trust (A) even though it sounds odd to many test-takers, then we can pull out the correct answer here and mark (A). Otherwise, we’re probably better off skipping this one.
Page 898, Question 7
Coincidentally enough, this is another question in which some awareness of financial terms would be helpful, and not all test-takers are likely to know all of the relevant jargon. Still, let’s give it a shot.
The words “although” and “actually” indicate that the sentence is putting forward contradictory ideas. So the word in the first blank needs to indicate the opposite of the idea of being able to stay in business. Let’s start there.
(A) gives us a word for the first blank that most test-takers won’t know, so let’s skip it for now.
(B) gives us a word that won’t work here, as we can probably figure out. You may recall that earlier in the book I cited “prudent” as a word that we might be able to recognize from its similarity to “Prudential,” a financial services company you might have seen advertised. From this association we can tell that “prudent” is a positive word—nobody would name their company “Stupid, Unreliable Financial Services.” That means it doesn’t work here.
(C) is a word that many students might not recognize. But we can recognize the prefix “auto-,” which has to do with the idea of self-directed activity. Does that seem relevant here? Probably not. So this one is probably no good.
(D) definitely seems like a word that contradicts the idea of being able to stay in business.
(E) definitely doesn’t work, because it’s a positive adjective.
So that would leave us with (D) as a word that seems to work, (A) as a word we don’t know, and (C) as another word we don’t know that’s unlikely to be correct. Now let’s take a look at the other blank.
The word in the second blank needs to describe some kind of activity that could let a company stay in business even when it shouldn’t be in business.
(A) definitely seems to work for that second blank, then.
(C) really doesn’t offer us much for the second blank. Even if we don’t know what “subordinate” means, we can probably recognize that “sub-“ means something is underneath something else, and that really doesn’t seem relevant here.
(D) doesn’t work for the second blank. There’s no way that “engaging in charitable activities,” which would basically mean giving stuff away for free, would allow a company to stay in business if it were bankrupt.
So at this point we may be able to figure out that (A) must be correct, since it has a word for the second blank that definitely fits and a word for the first blank that we don’t really know, and since all the other choices have flaws in them.
Page 909, Question 4
This is another example of a question in which the words in the blanks will rely on one another. In other words, if the first blank says something like “contradicted,” then the second blank needs to say something like “growing;” if the first blank were something like “supported,” though, then the second blank would need to be something like “shrinking.”