<p>Other than context, it's impossible, right? So you have to know the vocab. Right?</p>
<p>through deducing and logical reasoning you can get the SCs right most of the time without knowing the word</p>
<p>You can guess :P</p>
<p>But yeah you have to know minimum 4 of the words to get it right for CERTAIN</p>
<p>No, you need to know a minimum of 1 word right to get the answer for certain. If you know the exact definition, then it should perfectly fit.</p>
<p>argh I meant maximum. I’m too tired to talk coherently lol.</p>
<p>whenever you take practice sat’s, just look up all the words you don’t know and attempt to memorize them without writing them down. From this method and majority of the time, I know the 3 or 4 and sometimes 5 words of the answer choices and I deduce. Rarely do I get the sentence completions wrong.</p>
<p>THere’s no other way to get them mostly right without knowing some vocab.</p>
<p>edit: look them up after you’ve taken the practice test, lol XD</p>
<p>learn roots and guess</p>
<p>^ latin was pretty useless for me when I took it, lol</p>
<p>edit: I’ve taken latin for almost 7 years now.</p>
<p>Remember this: the answers for difficult SC questions are ALWAYS difficult words.</p>
<p>Buy and read both volumes of Direct Hits. Should only take two days or so. Problem solved.</p>
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<p>This is a brilliant strategy that I’ve utilized many times. The converse of this is that the answers for the easy SC are always easy words. So don’t over-think the first 1/3 of the SC. Put it this way: easy answers = popular answers. Hard answers = unpopular answers. For the last 1/3 of the questions, pick the answer choices that you think other people wouldn’t pick.</p>
<p>Other strategies
-direction (must the word that fills the blank be consistent with the overall tone of the sentence or is it the opposite?)
-positive/negative</p>
<ol>
<li>Easy questions have easy answers. </li>
<li>Hard questions have hard answers.</li>
<li>Pay attention to the author’s tone. Does the answer call for a positive word or a negative word?</li>
<li>Prefixes can be a big help. For example, DE means down, ANTI means opposite, RE means BACK and EX means OUT.</li>
<li>Use Process of Elimination (POE)
And finally GPAx213 is right. Direct Hits was truly amazing. Thank you Dark Knight where ever you are for recommending DH and posting those incredible charts.</li>
</ol>
<p>No way! I had no idea that easy ?s have easy answers and hard ?s have hard answers…</p>
<p>Wow I’m going to try that out next time! And def. going to buy DH when I start SAT prep again after hearing how amazing it is on CC…</p>
<p>Thanks guys!</p>
<p>Oh one question.
How big is each DH book? I just don’t understand how you can learn all those words in both books in 2 days like some people have done</p>
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<p>You may think it’s obvious, but don’t knock this strategy till you’ve tried it. Trust me, many of the more difficult SC’s you have gotten wrong could’ve been avoided with the popular/unpopular idea.</p>
<p>
It’s not necessarily true. The difficult SCs in International Nov. SAT were exactly the opposite. All the easy words were the answers whereas the difficult words were the wrong choices.</p>
<p>cc:</p>
<p>Do you have an example question? That doesn’t make sense because people tend to choose answer choices that contain words they know. If everyone picked the easier words and according to you consequently got the answer right, then they wouldn’t be considered difficult questions.</p>
<p>^some of the questions towards the end had answers like timidity and legendary_mythic whereas the other incorrect choices had much more difficult words.</p>
<p>Um, I completely disagree that hard questions always have hard answers.</p>
<p>This Dec test had a LOT of “easy” words as correct answers - toady, mitigate, etc. Those two words were next to words that sounded a LOT more complicated…</p>
<p>^ It doesn’t make sense otherwise. If someone sees an answer choice with a word he knows and it seems to make the SC correct, there is no reason for him to pick another answer choice. It wouldn’t be a difficult question if everyone got the answer right.</p>
<p>“Easy” is a relative term. I guarantee that the average high schooler does not know the definition of toady or mitigate (or both).</p>
<p>@jamesford:How will one know whether a question is difficult or not?</p>