<p>For verbal, I seem to get everything EXCEPT for sentence completions!! Analogies, and CR are both ok with me...But I just can't seem to understand sentence completions. Any tips?? Thanks!</p>
<p>hmm for sentence completions the answer, or rather the synonym or antonym to the answer seems to be in question oftentimes. if you do well on analogies, i'm assuming you don't need to work on your vocab, so it's all about picking up the hints they leave you. Also, try to fill in your own words for the blanks before you look at the answers they provide.</p>
<p>ok let's take this one for example:</p>
<p>In public, Chris is an amiable and generous donor, who gives freely of his time and money, yet his stinginess and ________ in private ________ this benevolent public image.</p>
<p>We know chris is generous in public and stingy in private, so his two images are opposites right? the other trait used to describe his public persona is "amiable," or easy to get along with. so we need a antonym for amiable for the first blank. </p>
<p>our choices are</p>
<p>A) callous...belie
B) immorality...display
C) perniciousness...evaluate
D) austerity....alleviate
E) contentment...contradict</p>
<p>E is obviously not the opposite of friendly,
D means strict, not really you can still be strict and friendly at the same time
C is hurtful, a pretty good match
B is immoral is a better antonym for moral than friendly
A is not thinking of other's feelings, that wouldn't make someone easy to get along with, so it's a possible match</p>
<p>by this pt we have C and A as possibilities so it's time to look at the second blank. If Chris shows one side of himself to the public, what is he doing with his benevolent public image? is he alleviating it? not really, alleviate has a positive connotation, and he's not really making his public image better by being a bad person in private. That leaves A. His private image belies, or is hidden by his benevolent public image. Therefore, A is the answer. Whew.</p>
<p>lol i just realized i eliminated C on the basis of the alleviate being the answer to the second blank when t's perniciousness....evaluate. well, his hostile and stingy nature in private doesn't exactly evaluate, or examine his public image does it?</p>
<p>thanks. also, i'm not very good at vocabulary, so that's half of the sentence completion problem. the other half is getting the clues straight, etc. how i do well on analogies if i don't have a vocabulary, i hope it's good luck.... <em>_</em> any other tips?</p>
<p>memorize words. if u knew all the words, you'd get everything right without all kids of strategies.</p>
<p>how am i going to memorize words in a few days??</p>
<p>and if there's no time to memorize, read read read. to get the hints straight, try circling the words that could be synonyms/antonyms for the word that's supposed to go in the blank. also mark words that indicate a change in meaning like however and those mark the ones that mean continuing in the same meaning, like in addition to. They often give you the definition of the word that's supposed to go in the blank as well. For example:</p>
<p>Sophocles, who wrote the play "Oedipus Rex" was one of the most________ playwrights of ancient Greece; in addition to seven complete plays fragments of more than eighty of his over hundred works are known to exist.</p>
<p>A) famous
B) qrandiloquent
C) captious
D) prolific
E) eclectic</p>
<p>most of the question is talking about how much stuff sophocles wrote. would having many works make him famous? maybe, but there also could be other playwrights in ancient Greece more famous. grandiloquent? nothing in the context suggests he uses flowery language (you can guess it's meaning: loquent should remind you of language, think eloquent and grand is large and impressive: unplain language) captious means cranky, and eclectic means drawn from many sources and neither of those is hinted at. which leaves prolific, producing many offspring or many works.</p>
<p>don't memorize, it's not worth it. do think about reviewing latin roots etc, that helps a lot with a lot of the "red herring" big words they throw at you. also, go over a list of vocab words in a review book; if you have a decent vocabulary, most won't be new to you, but just take a second to look up the ones you have no idea about. you don't have to consciously memorize them, looking at them will be good enough. you'll be surprised at what you remember on test day</p>
<p>Regarding stingy Chris... The first blank requires a noun to make the sentence gramatically correct. "Callous" is an adjective. Therefore, choice A cannot be correct. Checking for the correct part of speech is a good way of eliminating choices.</p>
<p>simple typo, he obviously meant callousness</p>