<p>Yakisoba, perhaps since you are so superior in your SAT knowledge, you are just playing with us when you use the non-word “alright”?</p>
<p>the sat affected my life for the better. it gives me hope, to counter my terrible GPA</p>
<p>You shouldn’t deride classmates for not knowing certain words. Unless you’re a national Spelling Bee winner or the like, there are always people better at vocabulary than you are.</p>
<p>I’m taking the SAT’s in December. So far, it’s taught me the value of working for my money. I took a part-time job to pay for my tutoring due to a recent financial hit my family took. I feel very grown-up cashing my paycheck and using that to pay my two tutors. I’m hoping my hard work will pay off.</p>
<p>The SAT makes me feel better about my GPA.</p>
<p>But in your story, think about it. You’re talking to freshman who have only been in high school for a few weeks. Most haven’t started studying for the SAT, or even started learning advanced vocabulary. Soon, however, they will start. And they’ll eventually get near your level. Because you know there’s this thing called the learning curve, where it’s really easy to learn simple information quickly but it gets harder and harder as the information progresses. </p>
<p>So while your classmates who didn’t know those words are rapidly learning new vocab and more, you’ll be slowly advancing your already elevated vocabulary. A lot of them will catch up to you or come near to you level of proficiency-- especially when they start caring about the SAT.</p>
<p>It didn’t affect my life at all.</p>
<p>Edit: reread the OP. "Next, the teacher asked “What’s ambivalent mean” and I go ‘indifferent’ and everyone is all like ‘How do you know this?’ and I’m like, ‘Cause I learned it? Duh?’ "</p>
<p>ASNDJKDNVLKANMCVBD
HAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHA
HAHAHHAHAHAHA</p>
<p>AMBIVALENT DOESN’T MEAN INDIFFERENT AT ALL. LULZ</p>
<p>But the OP got the question right on the SAT anyway, proving that you don’t really have to know what the words mean to get questions right. </p>
<p>I think it’s weird when people who speak English fluently and know a reasonable amount of words talk about how they’re working on “building [their] vocabulary” in English as if learning words from a list is actually a productive activity in itself. There’s nothing special about just knowing big words. It doesn’t make you smart…it just means you saw it before and they didn’t.</p>
<p>AMBIVALENT DOESN’T MEAN INDIFFERENT AT ALL. LULZ</p>
<p>not exactly ambivalent but like mixed feelings…i just said indifferent in class because that’s how I thought i should describe it</p>
<p>Just answer the question, k?</p>
<p>I’ve had people be amazed that London and Paris were in two different countries. So I usually don’t judge someone if they don’t have a expansive vocabulary, especially not freshman. I agree with the commenters above me, having that attitude towards people is going to make live that much more difficult. It may not seem like it now, but at some point you’ll realizes that you’ll have to humble yourself so play nice. I mean you don’t have to, but you won’t be well liked. As for the SAT, well it had a very negative impact for me. I hated seeing my friends pour over boxes of vocabulary and prep books just so they could have a chance of standing out from the sea of college applicants.</p>
<p>I’m a freshman, and I know what those words mean. I also know many other hard words, but I don’t brag about it. I’ve competed against older spellers than me and won, but I don’t brag about it. I also never think any of my classmates are dumb because they don’t know the meaning of serendipity. What I do is give them advice on how they can better their grades, and encourage them to start studying for the SATs now. Knowing stuff others don’t doesn’t make you better than them. You’ll realize this when you meet someone truly genius, and you won’t understand half the words coming outta his / her mouth.</p>
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<p>This is hypocritical in a weird self-referential way, but remember that unsolicited advice can come across as condescending.
I agree with you for the most part, though.</p>
<p>I don’t go around dishing unwanted comments. I meant when they come up to me and say, ‘How did you ace that test? It was so hard?’ or when they ask me for advice. I know better than anyone how much superior attitudes hurt the people around you. I can understand why you’d think that from my writing though. I should’ve expressed myself more clearly.</p>
<p>Nobody in the history of forever has ever gotten a PhD from Harvard because they know a bunch of five syllable words.</p>
<p>^um, but a lot of them do know big words. it can allow people to express themselves better. people who are THAT smart probably realize the benefits of having a wide vocabulary, especially in an intellectual environment, where those things matter, for whatever reason. </p>
<p>but to answer the question: it’s probably affected my life for the worse. what can an sat or act score show that a college level math/history/english class cannot? so i got a 700 on critical reading… that doesn’t mean i’m not ready for college. honestly, i think it’s a waste of time.</p>
<p>As far as I can tell (mostly from listening to talks where I understood nothing), most of the vocabulary you gain from higher education is in the form of technical terms specific to the field you’re studying, unless you had a relatively low English vocabulary to start with. And sometimes old words get new definitions…for example, in my ethics class they use the word “good” to mean something way different than what it usually means in real life.</p>
<p>(But just knowing definitions doesn’t help people express themselves. IMO there really aren’t any perfect synonyms, and all words have connotations and contexts in which they should and shouldn’t be used. People who use big words without knowing that kind of stuff end up sounding awkward and arrogant.)</p>
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<p>The SAT people would probably consider you ready for college with like a 500. The only people who ever say 700 is a bad score are the crazy people on here…it’s a 95th percentile score.</p>
<p>@clementines - I said “nobody in the history of forever has ever gotten a PhD from Harvard because they know a bunch of five syllable words” as in, nobody has ever graduated from a top tier university simply because they know a lot of big words. Intelligent people have elevated vocabularies (**sometimes: my father’s friend teaches Calculus at MIT - can’t differentiate between “was” and “were” and knows very few multisyllabic words since he’s an immigrant), elevated vocabularies are not always the sole indicator of intelligence… unless there’s some degree at Harvard regarding a doctorate in fancy words I’m unaware of.</p>
<p>But ok? LOLOLOL.</p>
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<li><p>well, since it’s keeping me from getting over a 2300, then yeah, i think it’s bad. it’s not my fault colleges consider these things important.</p></li>
<li><p>is that supposed to mean something more? i’m very sensitive about this now LOL</p></li>
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<p>people who have harvard phds probably know how to use big/technical words without sounding awkward. maybe arrogant, but if they’re using technical terms about their area of expertise, then it probably just sounds arrogant to someone who doesn’t understand.</p>
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<p>if someone’s worked up to a phd, then he or she has probably had to read a lot of books for a bunch of different classes, or has been exposed to more than in youth. so they probably know more words just by growing up and having more schooling. but if a person got a phd in a writing field, like in journalism, this person probably has a wide vocabulary just for writing’s sake. but it doesn’t really matter how big the words are.</p>
<p>and i wasn’t really talking about synonyms, more like just knowing a lot of words to better express yourself, especially in writing. it gets boring if you use the same words over and over.</p>
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<p>yeah, i never said that either. but okay LOLOLOL</p>
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<p>that’s what i said</p>
<p>Using the same words/Using simple words/etc is boring and uncreative, especially in writing… except when you consider people like John Steinbeck and Hemingway who always used standard diction and simplistic syntactical style and are both of rather credible literary merit… lols.</p>
<p>Also - if you “never said that” then you don’t have any grounds to refute my point? [Oops, omitted - did I say that? I didn’t mean to. I forgot that you aren’t fond of my jokes.]</p>
<p>once again, i never said “simple” words. </p>
<p>i mean:
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<p>because i didn’t say that, right?? </p>
<p>i never argued that you couldn’t write well if you used ordinary words. i just said that people with phds probably know a lot of complex words from their education. and the example i gave was about journalists, anyway, not creative/novel writing.</p>
<p>i wouldn’t call what i was doing as trying to “refute” your point. you get so b****y over everything</p>