Up Your Score (7 page)

For each sentence completion question, the ETS presents you with a nice, logical sentence. The trouble is that one or two words are missing from it. Your job is to pick the correct missing word(s) from among five choices. All of the possible answers make sense grammatically, but only one will make sense logically.

Some students consider sentence completions to be the hardest part of the verbal section because they test your sense of “sentence logic” in addition to testing your vocabulary. We think they are the easiest part because you have a context to help you figure out the answer. For example:

The man was smelly so I plugged my ________.

(A) ear

(B) toe

(C) eye

(D) socket

(E) nose

Each of these choices is okay grammatically, but why would you plug your eye, toe, ear, or socket if the man was smelly? You would plug your nose. Usually, the SAT questions are more sophisticated, but the logic is the same.

If you approach them properly, the sentence completion questions can be extremely gratifying. When you choose the right words to go in the blanks, the sentence will have a certain flow, a sort of magical aura that will suffuse your body with a warm, rapturous glow.

You should follow a basic thought pattern whenever you attack a sentence completion question:

1. Read the sentence first, skipping over the blanks, just to get a feel for how the sentence is set up.

2. Read the sentence again, and this time when you get to the blanks, guess
on your own
what the missing words should be. You may not be able to come up with a specific word, but all you really need to determine is the answer’s generic category—whether the word is a “negative” or a “positive” one. In the blank write a “+” or “–” to remind yourself what type of word you’re looking for. When there are two blanks, you should at least decide whether the two missing words are synonyms or antonyms, “good” or “bad.”

3. Compare your guesses with the answer choices provided and see if any of them fit your general idea of what the answer should be.

4. Plug in the answer that looks best and see if it makes sense.

5. If it clearly makes sense, then go with it. Otherwise, try all the other choices and pick the one that works best. If the question contains double blanks, make sure that you carefully read
both
words for every answer choice, and pick the
pair
that best fits the blanks. As you’re trying choices, cross out the ones that you’re sure don’t fit. Then, if you get stuck and decide to come back to the question, you won’t have to waste time reading all of the choices again.

After some practice, these rules should become second nature, so you won’t have to go through a three-minute process on each problem.

Okay, enough rules. Here is an example.

She insulted Irving’s appearance by saying, “Your face is _______.”

(A) cheerful

(B) beautiful

(C) handsome

(D) charming

(E) a wart-ridden, misshapen mass of snotty goo

That wasn’t too tough. And did you notice that magical feeling when you chose (E)?

Let’s try some from real SATs.

Until Florence Nightingale made nursing ________, it was considered a ________ profession.

(A) scientific . . . painstaking

(B) essential . . . dangerous

(C) noble . . . lofty

(D) patriotic . . . worthy

(E) respectable . . . degrading

You should read this question, “Until Florence Nightingale made nursing
something good,
it was considered a
something bad that’s the opposite of whatever’s in the first blank
profession.” You can eliminate (C) and (D) because
lofty
and
worthy
are both words that mean something good. You can eliminate (A) and (B) because they aren’t opposites. Now you know the answer is (E). Check it, and it makes sense. Yippee!

Although they are ________ by traps, poison, and shotguns, predators ________ to feast on flocks of sheep.

(A) lured . . . refuse

(B) destroyed . . . cease

(C) impeded . . . continue

(D) encouraged . . . attempt

(E) harmed . . . hesitate

The correct answer here is (C). Any time you see
although,
the sentence will have two parts. The first part will say “blah blah blah.” The second part of the sentence will say something that you wouldn’t expect considering that “blah blah blah” is true. In the above example, the first part of the sentence says, “Nasty things are trying to stop these predators from pigging out.” Therefore, you would expect that they would decide not to pig out. However, the
although
indicates that the second part of the sentence will say the opposite of what you expected it to say. So you have to choose an answer that indicates that they are still pigging out. The only answer that would fit this idea is (C).

As a scientist, Leonardo da Vinci was capable of ________, but his mistakes are remarkably few in light of his ________.

(A) error . . . accomplishments

(B) artistry . . . failures

(C) genius . . . works

(D) trivia . . . lapses

(E) innovation . . . achievements

In the same way that
although
was the key word in the previous example,
but
is the key word in this example. You should be able to figure out that the two missing words should be in the combination “bad thing . . . good thing.” In other words, you should think to yourself, “As a scientist, Leo made some bad mistakes,
but
his screwups seem pretty minor when you look at the good things he did.” Scanning the list of possible answers, you see that

(A) is “bad” . . . “good”

(B) is “good” . . . “bad”

(C) is “good” . . . “irrelevant”

(D) is “irrelevant” . . . “bad”

(E) is “good” . . . “good”

Therefore, the correct answer must be (A).

Following are other key words (like
although
and
but
) that can change the logic of a sentence:

• despite
  
• except
  
• far from (
  Far from
  doing blah blah, the thing has done almost the opposite of blah blah.)
  
• in spite of
  
• instead of
  
• nevertheless
  
• unless
  
• while (
  While
  that is true, it is also true that this is true.)
  
• yet (That is true,
  yet
  we must also recognize that this is true.)
  

In the sentence completion section, as you will see in the reading comprehension section, the ETS tries to be politically correct. So if you see a sentence that mentions women or minorities, it is probably saying something good about them. For instance:

Although few in number, women in Congress have had ________ impact on a variety of issues.

(A) an arbitrary

(B) a negligible

(C) a substantial

(D) a minor

(E) an inadvertent

You could get this problem right without even reading more than the first few words in the sentence. All you have to realize is that “substantial” is the only positive word among the answer choices.

The ETS thinks that just knowing that congresswomen are influential on Capitol Hill will help every girl in SAT-Land do well on the test, get into her top-choice college, and then excel in her career.

Using the principle that the questions at the beginning of a subsection are easy, you should avoid choosing difficult vocabulary
words at the beginning of a sentence completion subsection. For example, this question is the second one in its subsection:

Just as congestion plagues every important highway, so it ________ the streets of every city.

(A) delimits

(B) delays

(C) clogs

(D) obviates

(E) destroys

Delimits
and
obviates
are difficult vocabulary words. If you had to know the meanings of these two words to answer this question correctly, then this question would be difficult and it would not be the second problem in the section. So eliminate (A) and (D). The correct answer is (C).

The reading passages make up the majority of the critical reading section, so make sure you can do these well. Unfortunately, it is the only part of the SAT that you can’t sit down and study for in any direct way. Fortunately, however, it’s also the part of the test for which you’ve been studying for the longest time. You’ve been reading and analyzing books since kindergarten (remember
The Giving Tree
?). The reading passages might seem difficult because they’re so incredibly long and boring—let’s face it, the passages that the ETS chooses don’t exactly read like a Suzanne Collins book—but that is precisely why the ETS chooses them. They’re so obscure and unpopular that no student in his or her right mind would ever have read them before. The sheer dullness of these passages would put your
physics teacher to sleep, let alone a bunch of teenagers who usually sleep until noon on a Saturday. That’s why you have to learn how to focus on reading these passages, how to pick up what’s important, and, most importantly, how to get through them without nodding off.

The ability to read quickly can be a big advantage. So read only those words that start with
w
. “Hold it,” you say, “but then I won’t understand anything.” To which we respond, “Oh yeah, you’re right, sorry,” and then suggest, “Try reading everything very carefully and make sure you comprehend it all.” To which you respond, “But then I won’t have time to finish the test.”

This is the heart-wrenching conflict you must deal with on the critical reading section: to speed or not to speed. All we can say is, do as many practice tests as you possibly can so that you know how fast you can read and still understand as much as possible.

Fancy speed-reading tricks probably won’t help much. Psychologists have found that speed-reading tricks really only teach you how to skim a text by skipping details. But for critical reading questions you have to know the details.

In order to improve your comprehension, we recommend that you expand your reading horizons. If your reading matter is presently limited to cereal boxes and the school’s bathroom stalls, it’s time to explore new possibilities. Caution:
Do not attempt to switch cold turkey!
Many a student has gone into intellectual shock after attempting to jump straight from
Teen Vogue
to
The Plasma Physicist’s Quarterly
. We suggest that you work up to quality reading material using this one-week plan:

Day 1:
Outlaw Biker
(This is a real mag!)

Day 2:
WWE Magazine

Day 3:
The National Enquirer

Day 4:
Seventeen

Day 5:
Soap Opera Digest

Day 6:
People

Day 7:
Rolling Stone

Now you should be ready to tackle the kind of reading you are likely to find on the SAT. Read things like
The New York Times, American Heritage, Time, Newsweek, The Atlantic, National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Scientific American,
and
Forbes.

Reading these magazines is important for many reasons. First of all, you get to impress your friends with all the great vocabulary (“Dude, evanescence is my MO—one minute I’m here, the next minute I’m gone.”). Secondly, you’ll do better on your writing section. And lastly, if you can survive an eight-page article on interest rates in the Middle East, you can survive anything the Serpent throws at you.