SAT — words in context

Words in context is the most common question type on the Reading and Writing section, and it is not a vocabulary test in the way it looks. Every word offered is one an able seventeen-year-old has met; what decides the answer is a clause somewhere else in the passage that settles which word the sentence can take. These ten questions come in the two shapes the real test uses. Six give a passage with a blank and ask which word completes it most precisely. Four mark a word already in the passage and ask what it most nearly means there.

The four meaning questions are built on words that carry more than one established sense, because that is where this question type does its work. One asks about "sanction", which means both to authorize and to penalize — two opposite senses in one word — and the passage settles it twice over, once by saying the commission sanctions the schemes it approves of and again by calling what it issues an endorsement. Another asks about "nominal", where the sentence that follows divides what an emperor still has, edicts and ceremonies, from what has gone elsewhere, taxes and troops and obedience: forms without substance, which is the word exactly. A third asks about "arrest", and its wrong answers include "slow" — close enough that it is worth pausing on, since a joint that is deteriorating slowly and a joint that has stopped deteriorating are different things, and the last clause of the passage says which one is meant.

The wrong answers in the completion questions each fail for a stated reason rather than by being obviously unsuitable, and the reasons repeat across the section: a word right in meaning but wrong in degree; a word naming a neighboring idea rather than the one required, as when a word about how openly someone speaks is offered where the sentence asks how deeply a report investigates; and a word carrying the wrong connotation for a sentence that has already signaled approval or criticism. Each explanation says what the passage requires of the missing word before saying which choice meets it, which is the order worth practicing, because a reader who decides what is needed before reading the options is much harder to tempt.

Every study, committee, architect and institution in these passages is invented, and no invented finding is attributed to a real organization, journal or university. Nothing is reproduced from any College Board publication, released test, practice test, question bank or scoring guideline: the passages were written fresh for this exercise.

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• Decide what a blank requires before reading the choices offered for it
• Find the clause elsewhere in a passage that settles which word can fill a blank
• Choose between two senses of a word that carries both, using the sentence around it
• Recognize a word that is right in meaning but wrong in degree
• Reject a word that names a neighboring idea rather than the one the sentence needs
• Match the connotation of a word to the approval or criticism a passage has signaled
• Refuse the commonest everyday sense of a word when the passage requires another
• Read a colon or a following sentence as a definition of the word just used

Consider this passage. "The commission had no power to compel the regional authorities and no money of its own to offer. It could only sanction the schemes it approved of; but its endorsement carried such weight with lenders that a scheme without it rarely found funding at all." As used by the writer, the word "sanction" most nearly means