SAT — words in context, second set

A second set on the section's most frequent question type, split evenly between the two shapes: five passages with a blank to fill, and five with a word to define. The five words chosen for definition all carry a sense more common than the one the passage requires, which is the whole difficulty. A reader who arrives with a meaning ready is the reader these questions are built for.

Take "economy". Almost everyone reaches first for the wealth and resources of a country, and the passage is about prose: nothing described twice, no character given a sentence more than the story needs, a room established in four words. The word means thrift, applied to words instead of money, and the nearest wrong answer — careful management of money — is wrong only because no money is in question. "Compromise" works the same way with an order of events: a hairline crack compromises an assembly, which then fails minutes later, so the word has to name the damage that precedes failure rather than failure itself, and "destroy instantly" collapses two steps the sentence separates with the word "then". "Qualified" is settled by a clause placed before it: the findings were not overturned, so the word cannot mean contradicted, and the two examples that follow show claims left standing with their reach cut down.

The other two turn on something the writer supplies deliberately. A comparison — faces as unconvincing as the painted grin of a shop mannequin — defines "plastic" as artificial rather than as pliable or durable, both of which are real senses of the word with nothing here to attach to. And a professor's complaint that an essay reduced a six-sided conflict to two sides defines "address" as grappling with rather than mentioning, which the essay plainly did at length.

The five completion questions work by elimination on grounds that are stated rather than felt. One offers a word that would leave a national debt unchanged, one that would shrink it, and one that would merely postpone it, against a sentence saying the burden grows. Another sets a temporary halt against acceleration, increase, and scattering. Each explanation says what the sentence requires before naming the choice that supplies it, which is the order that makes these questions quick.

Every architect, economist, artist and commission in these passages is invented, and no invented finding is attributed to any real organization, journal or university. Nothing is reproduced from any College Board publication, released test, practice test, question bank or scoring guideline.

Zestly is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with the College Board, which owns the SAT, and it is not an exam center.

• Choose between two established senses of a word using the sentence that contains it
• Refuse the sense of a word you arrived with when the passage requires another
• Use a comparison the writer supplies as the definition of the word it follows
• Read a clause placed before a word as a constraint on what it can mean
• Tell a word naming damage from a word naming the failure that damage caused
• Distinguish a word right in meaning but wrong in degree from the one required
• Decide what a blank requires before reading the choices offered for it
• Eliminate a wrong answer by asking what it would leave unchanged
• Recognize when two of the offered words mean nearly the same thing, and rule out both

Consider this passage. "What strikes a reader first about the late stories is their economy. Nothing is described twice, no character is given a sentence more than the story needs, and a room is established in four words where the early work would have spent a paragraph on it." As used by the writer, the word "economy" most nearly means