If you are reading this in an email you received from me, do not click the link to sat.collegeboard.org below. Use the link to my website that is farther down on the email. If you are seeing this in my blog, do the SAT Question of the Day by clicking on this link:
http://sat.collegeboard.org/practice/sat-question-of-the-day?questionId=20131002&oq=1 (This link takes you to today’s question. If you use my archive, you will see the question related to my SAT explanation for that date.)
The answer is C. Well, this is a tough question and would be very late in the Sentence Completion section. Do you really need to get it to achieve your target score? If not, there are no worries. Only 36% of the students have gotten it right. Using the strategy of identifying the topic and making a prediction, I came up with “hesitant” or “shy” about giving his opinions. I knew that B, D, and E were definitely wrong. Answer A, scurrilous, has a “nasty person” connotation but I couldn’t exactly define it. That left me with Answer C, chary, which is a word I didn’t know.
Here’s my point–sometimes you don’t know the definition of the words but you can guess. When do you do that? Don’t leave a blank if you can eliminate ONE answer and more is better. The “guessing penalty” becomes a “guessing reward” at that point. Of course, it is better to eliminate more but the odds are with you once one has been eliminated. I explain why this is true on Video #1.
Let’s see what the ACT folks have for us today.
ACT Question of the Day: Use your “back” button to return to my website after reading the ACT Question of the Day.
The answer is J. Here’s another word I didn’t know before I started doing the ACT Question of the Day about a year ago. However, the ACT folks keep using the same questions over and over again including this one. I didn’t even have to read the context to get it right!
However, it’s a great question to make an important point about the test. The test writers often intentionally use words that practically nobody knows. Don’t panic. They want to see if you can use context to answer the question not whether you’ve memorized cumbrous from a word list! It certainly isn’t a word you hear everyday. This context tells us things had to proceed in a “very exact form…without a mistake.” The only answer that comes even close is burdensome. So, don’t worry when you see words you don’t know. Just use the context.
Saturday is SAT day for some of you. Be sure you’ve read my blog on what to eat for breakfast or watch Video #1. Research has shown that eating the right things instead of the wrong things can affect your score.
The SAT & ACT Wizard
