Explanations – SAT Practice Test 2 VERBAL 1. C The important idea in this sentence is that the woman “lost herself in her work,” which means it must have been “inspiring” (A), “complex” (B) or “absorbing”(C), not “exhausting” (D) or “repetitive”(E). If she were really involved in her work, she would have been ignorant of the noise around her. This rules out (A) and (B); if the work were “inspiring” or “complex” she wouldn’t be “annoyed by” or “involved in” the noise. (C) works: her work was so “absorbing” that she was completely “oblivious to” the noise. 2. C “In contrast to” is the signal; that there is the difference between the piranhas’ image and the reality that many species of piranha are vegetarian. The word in the blank has to emphasize the piranha’s image as a carnivore. (C), “voracious,” or “greedy, ravenous, having a huge appetite,” works best. “Nomadic” (A) means “moving from place to place”; “lugubrious” (B) means “mournful”; (D) “covetous” means “eagerly desiring something belonging to someone else.” (E) might have been tempting, but the fact that piranhas seem “exotic” has nothing to do with their diet. 3. A This sentence has quite a bit of verbiage that you can ignore. The important thing to see is that there is a contrast between the “modern, ---- subway stations” and the “graceful curves” of the old buildings. The word in the blank, therefore, has to be something like “rectangular.” (A), “rectilinear,” which means “characterized by straight lines” is the only one of the choices that provides the necessary contrast. 4. B The structural clue “while” alerts you that vetiver does not have a disruptive impact on the local ecology like kudzu does. A good prediction for th blank would then b “negative,” because vetiver has “no negative effects.“ The only good match for this prediction among the choices is (B), “adverse,” which means “unfavorable.” Vetiver clearly has “foreseeable” (A) and “advantageous” (E) effects because it controls soil erosion, so these choices are wrong. (C), “domestic,” doesn’t make sense in the sentence. Since you don’t know whether kudzu’s impact on the ecology is permanent, (D) doesn’t fit either. 5. E Concentrate on the second blank first. It stands to reason that Douglass would pattern his autobiography after Equiano’s own “autobiography” or “life story.” The only choice that has a second-blank word coming even close to this prediction is (E), “consciously narrative,” “Consciously” fits well into the first blank, too; Gates think that Douglass patterned his autobiography after Equiano’s narrative “consciously,” or “on purpose.” (E) is the correct answer. For more material and information, please visit TaiLieu Du Hoc at www.tailieuduhoc.org “patronizingly” (A) means “condescendingly.” An “epitaph” (D) is the “inscription on a tomb or grave.” 6. D The first blank has to be consistent with “lived a lonely life”; you can predict a word like “uncommunicativeness.” This rules out (B) “career” and (E) “gregariousness,” which means “sociability.” SInce Houseman did let a few close friends into his life, these friends must have been able to “get past” the “uncommunicativeness.” The choice that matches these predictions is (D), “reserve . penetrate.” “Reserve” is restraint in one”s words and actions.” (A) is out because close friends would not “spurn,” or disdainfully reject,” Houseman. “Seclusion” works in (C), but “observe” doesn’t make any sense in the second blank. 7. B Narrowing your focus helps with this sentence. Look at the phrase “patriotic and other ---- cliches.” The first blank has to be a word for a category that “patriotic” falls into, such as “ideological” (B). For the second blank, you can infer that in an impersonal world, relief will come from occasional “displays” of emotion. (B), “ideological manifestations,” has what you need to fill the blanks. “Pragmatic,” which mens “practical,” doesn’t work in the first blank, and “absences” is the opposite of what we want in the second blank. “Ephemeral” (D) means “lasting a very short time,” while “vestiges” (E) means “trace or makes left by something.” 8. C The semi-colon in the middle of the sentence tells you that the two halves of the sentence have similar meanings. If a plan has “caused widespread resentment,” then it has few elements that will “make the party popular” with the electorate. We need a word that means “make popular.” “Ingratiate” )C) means “to gain favor or acceptance”; it’s the only choice that has the predicted meaning. To “consolidate” (B) is to “join together into one whole or to strengthen,” and the party doesn’t want to merge with the electorate, so (B)’s out. “Involve” (A) gives you a strange sentence when you plug it in. A political party is always involved with the electorate. “Deprecate” (D), to “express disapproval,” doesn’t make sense in the context of the sentence. (E) “impeach,” “to charge with a crime, especially the crime of misconduct in a public office” might have tricked you because it’s a word that fits in with the political subject matter of the sentence. But it doesn’t fit in with the meaning of the sentence. 9. C This is particularly difficult question, which you can anticipate because it comes at the end of the set. Several of the choices look good at first, which is why you have to look carefully at the sentence. You need an adjective describing the students who founded the literacy movement. They all had come from French-speaking colonies to live in France; so they were “expatriate” students, (C), which means “exiled from or living outside of one”s country.” The word “expatriate” derives from the root PATER, or “father” which is also found in “paternal.” And the prefix “EX” means “out.” So to For more material and information, please visit TaiLieu Du Hoc at www.tailieuduhoc.org move out from your “fatherland” or native country is to “EX-patriate.” “Laconic” (B) means “not talkative” and doesn’t fit the context. The students may have been “radical” (D) or “sophisticated” (E), but the evidence in the sentence that they were “expatriated” is much stronger. 10. C The WRIST is the joint that attaches the HAND to the rest of the body, in the same way that the ANKLE is the joint that attaches the FOOT to the rest of the body. None of the other pairs of words int he choices fits into the stem bridge. 11. E A good stem bridge here is “to REVERE someone is to ADMIRE that person intensely.” Analogously, to “scrutinize” something is to “examine” it intensely. “Think” and “ponder,” in (C), are synonyms; there is no difference in degree of intensity. In (B), to “delay” something a great deal is not to “cancel” it. 12. A A HEDONIST is primarily occupied with the pursuit of PLEASURE; a “philosopher” is primarily occupied with the pursuit of “knowledge.” In (B), a “stenographer,” knows “shorthand” and in (C), a “physicist” studies “energy,” but they are not, by definition, primary occupied with these things. In (D) a “progressive” wants social improvement through government action, not necessarily “liberty.” 13. E When something is being UNEARTHed, the process is called EXCAVATION (digging something out and removing it). Similarly, “imprisoning” someone is the process of INCARCERATION. In (A), the process of “addition” does not always involve “constructing.” In (D), “imposition” is “the act of imposing.” “Demanding” something is not imposing something on someone, so this pair of words doesn’t work. 14. C Something that is ABSTRUSE is by definition difficult to UNDERSTAND. Likewise, something that is OBSCURED is difficult to SEE. Things that are “unusable” (A) can still be changed; things that are “faulty” are not always difficult to “fix” (B); things that are “irrelevant” (D) may be easy to “prove.” None of these has a bridge that matches the stem bridge. “Tepid” (A) means “lukewarm,” not “difficult to heat.” 15. B You may have been tempted to pick the wrong answer if you didn’t make your stem bridge specific enough. To say that “s SILO is a place that holds GRAIN” leaves you with both (B) and (E) as possible right answers. The bridge you need is “a SILO is a place where GRAIN is stored.” Nobody stores water in a well, which eliminates (E), but a “pantry” is a place where “food” is stored, so (B)’s bridge is the one that matches the stem bridge. For more material and information, please visit TaiLieu Du Hoc at www.tailieuduhoc.org Writer Pair Just a reminder about general strategy: read the first passage and do the questions relating to it (questions 1-5 in this case), then read the second passage and do the rest of the questions. These two passages are not that difficult to get through, and the authors’ points of view on the process of writing contrast clearly and sharply. The author of Passage 1 believes that the writer experiences his writing as an “act of discovery” which is not in his power to control. When the writer finds the proper tone of voice for his writing, he enters some sort of magical state in which “sentences mysteriously shape themselves” right before his eyes. After he is finished, he will feel “that there is an order to things, and that he himself is part of that order.” The author of Passage 2, on the other hand, approaches his writing “as if it were a job like any other.” He ascribes “dangerous” notions like that of the author of Passage 1 to the influence of the nineteenth-century Romantic movement. Writing to him is “hard labor with no guaranteed reward.” Although being a good writer takes talent, it also requires a lot of difficult learning and, for him at least, “an enormous amount of bruising self-questioning.” 16. C The author of Passage 1 says that unless a writer is “writing mechanically,” he experiences his writing as an act of discovery. “Mechanically” is used here in the sense of “unimaginatively” (C). None of the other choices works in the context of the sentence. 17. E Reading a few lines up from the reference to “unlocking the floodgates,” you find the author asserting that creative writing is “not within the power of [the writer’s] will to summon forth” or to resist. When he talks about how to “unlock the floodgates,” then, he is suggesting that creative writing is “in part beyond the writer’s conscious control” (E). The author of Passage 1 never says that almost anyone can be a writer (A), that writing derives its power from depicting dramatic events (C), or that it requires a rigid sense of structure and form (D). He does suggest that writing can be very difficult (B), but not until the end of the passage. 18. C In lines 16-25, the author describes his vision of what happens when the writer finds the right tone of voice for his writing: he sits and watches as sentences and paragraphs mysteriously form themselves, etc. What is being conveyed here is the writer’s sense of “wonder at the seemingly magical process of creation” (C). You probably could have picked out (C) without going back to the passage, simply by eliminating the other choices. The author of Passage 1 never talks about “frustration at the unpredictability of writing” (A) or about “discovering an unsuspected talent” (D) . A writer is driven by a “dim vision” and does not seem to need to plan a project (B). Writing is “hard labor” (E) to the author of Passage 2, not the author of Passage 1. For more material and information, please visit TaiLieu Du Hoc at www.tailieuduhoc.org 19. A Look at the context in which “dim” appears. The author is poetically describing what happens during creative writing: “ .paragraphs begin to shape themselves into an organically coherent pattern that corresponds only better, much better to the dim vision which had driven him to his desk in the first place.” Cutting through the flowery language, you see that the writer only has a vague idea of what he wants to write when he sits down, but things get much clearer once he starts to write. “Dim” is used in the sense of “vague” (A). 20. A Re-reading the sentence at the end of the third paragraph should be enough to enable you to pick out the right choice. It is “the writer’s search for order,” according to the author, “ .which exists not only in poems and stories, but in any form of writing, however humble or trivial.” (A) paraphrases this nicely. The other choices may seem to be plausible general reasons for referring to different forms of writing, but they don’t work in the context of Passage 1. 21. B As with the previous question, all of the choices here seem like plausible reasons for adopting a “professional attitude to writing.” Only one can fit what the author actually says, though–which is that the only way he can “ensure a consistent output is to approach writing as if it were a job like any other.” He wants to “maintain a high level of productivity” (B). 22. D In lines 50-68, the author of Passage 2 attacks the “dangerous misconceptions” that many people have about the creative process of writing. The problem, he states, is that we still believe the “fanciful notions” of the Romantic movement. “Fanciful” clearly has a negative connotation here, which makes “unrealistic” (D) the best choice. 23. B As we saw in the last question, the author of Passage 2 launches an attack on the Romantics and their fanciful notions about artistic creativity. His main target is Coleridge, whose work led to the belief “that the creation of art is unlike every other form of human productivity”–an idea the author doesn’t agree with at all. The author is suggesting, therefore, that Coleridge’s writings “propagated erroneous ideas about artistic creativity” (B). The author himself, not Coleridge, emphasizes the “role of maturity in an artist,” so (A) is out. (C) is wrong because the author thinks that Coleridge spread false ideas about art, not that Coleridge “exaggerated the importance of the arts.” Furthermore, there is no suggestion in the passage that Coleridge ignored how long it takes to learn writing skills (D) or that he exalted experience over talent (E). 24. D The author of Passage 2 compares writing to “breaking rocks to look for gold” in emphasizing that writing is hard work with no guaranteed reward. Looking through the answer choices, the one that echoes this sentiment most reasonably is (D). The author does think that writing requires unusual talent (A), but that has nothing to do with his analogy. (B) is far too extreme, while (C) is out because the author is not considering here what other people think of writers. For more material and information, please visit TaiLieu Du Hoc at www.tailieuduhoc.org Nor is he concentrating on the possible rewards of writing (E), although such rewards do, no doubt, exist. 25. D When he says that “writers are born rather than made,” the author means that some people feel compelled to write by their “response to narrative .sensitivity towards language, and .curiosity about human nature.” These are “innate abilities” that “play an important role in determining who will become a writer” (D). (A) contradicts the author’s continual stress on writing as hard labor. (B) is reasonable but does not explain the author’s statement. (C) and (E) both contradict the idea that writers are born, not made; if childhood experiences make someone a writer, then a writer would be made, not born. 26. A Several of the choices here look good, especially (E), until you re-read the last paragraph of Passage 2. The author criticizes the publishing world for overlooking “craft and maturity of vision” in favor of “novelty and originality.” (A) is therefore the right answer. None of the other choices, plausible as it may seem to be, is mentioned by the author in his criticism of the publishing world. 27. A The second paragraph of Passage 1 has been the subject of several questions so far. It’s the description of creative writing as a kind of blissful mystical experience in which sentences and paragraphs form before the writer’s eyes. Look through the choices to see which one jumps out–you know enough at this point to predict what Passage 2’s author would say. He would see this description of the writing process as overly romantic, and point out that it “does not reflect the hard work that writing involves” (A). The author of Passage 2 doesn’t give an opinion about the musicality of words (B) or the structure of a work (E). His idea that writers are “born, not made” (C) is not his main concern; the true nature of writing is. As for (D), this criticism simply doesn’t apply to the description of the writing process in Passage 1. 28. E The author of Passage 1 spends his last paragraph discussing the terror that a writer faces staring a blank page, and the fact that a writer has to be willing to risk suffering in the process of writing. The author of Passage 2 talks about the “enormous amount of bruising self-questioning” he had to undertake before he started to write. Judging from this, the two authors would agree that writing entails a lot of “emotional pain” (E). The author of Passage 2, but not the author of Passage 1, stresses the importance of “life experience” (A), “background reading” (C) and “maturity” (D). Only the author of Passage 1 emphasizes the importance of “inspiration” (B). For more material and information, please visit TaiLieu Du Hoc at www.tailieuduhoc.org . Explanations – SAT Practice Test 2 VERBAL 1. C The important idea in this sentence is that the. Writing is “hard labor” (E) to the author of Passage 2, not the author of Passage 1. For more material and information, please visit Tai Lieu Du Hoc at www.tailieuduhoc.org