<p>i am definitely too lazy to study thousands of SAT words which are not likely to show up in October's SAT. so what should i study? can anyone recommend a list of prefixes and latin roots? i noticed that most of the words i dont know have a latin origin. maybe studying latin roots is too much. i recently tried the Grammatix strategy, but that did not help at all</p>
<p>check your inbox-- :)</p>
<p>ok, i got an example:</p>
<p>The director complained that the sitcom's theme song was downright-------, having no more pep and vigor than a -------.</p>
<p>i am able to eliminate the answer choices to two:</p>
<p>(B) inchoate...lullaby
(C) lugubrious...dirge</p>
<p>i had no idea what inchoate and lugubrious meant when i first attempted this question. how would you approach this if you were me Mike?</p>
<p>If you knew what inchoate and lugubrious meant then you knew what lullaby and dirge meant, and thats enough to make a good "guess"</p>
<p>cool.</p>
<p>i take it you know what "lullaby" and "dirge" mean, and you can tell that both types of song are relatively free of pep and vigor. that means we have to work on the first blank.</p>
<p>notice that the words in both choices have multiple syllables, with prefixes and suffixes. let's consider them individually.</p>
<p><strong><em>inchoate</em></strong>
(b) has a probable prefix "in-", a probable suffix "-ate," and a probable root "cho."</p>
<p>"in-" looks like the standard negative prefix (as in "indestructible"), though it might also be a locating prefix like (like in "inside").</p>
<p>"-ate" usually has something to do with verbs. we know that the word "inchoate" has to be an adjective, since we also know that "lugubrious" is an adjective, from its suffix "-ious."</p>
<p>"cho" doesn't ring any kinds of bells for me, so i'll ignore it for the time being.</p>
<p>if the suffix "-ate" is generally associated with verbs, and the prefix "-in" is a negative prefix, then i can gather that "inchoate" probably means something along the lines of "not cho'ed" (whatever "cho" means). i can think of adjectives that have a similar (verb-oriented) construction pretty easily:</p>
<p>"inconsiderate" means something close to "not considered."
"intemperate" means something close to "not tempered."
"illiterate" means something close to "not lettered" (that is, not familiar with letters).</p>
<p>so i'm probably on the right track. i don't know what the "cho" part of "inchoate" means, but there's a pretty good chance that "inchoate" means that something hasn't been done by somebody.</p>
<p><strong><em>lugubrious</em></strong>
this word has a probable suffix "-ious," which indicates the word is an adjective. its root might be "lugubr," or there might even be two roots in there.</p>
<p>does the "lugubr" root mean anything to me? lemme think. i can think of the word "loogy," which is distasteful but probably doesn't have anything to do with "lugubr." "lugubr" does sound pretty negative, though--it just sounds ugly when it comes out of your mouth. that's something i want to fit in with the context of the sentence.</p>
<hr>
<p>so let's take a look at what we've got. for (b), we have a word that probably indicates something hasn't been done yet. for (c), we have a word that looks vaguely sad, but not much else to go on.</p>
<p>so now we need to ask ourselves: knowing that the SAT sentence completions prefer answer choices that restate the sentence as much as possible, which of the two unknown words seems most likely to be restating the idea of "having no . . . pep and vigor"?</p>
<p>if "inchoate" is the answer, that would mean that the theme hasn't been "pepped" or "vigored" yet. in other words, for "inchoate" to be right, "cho" has to be something close to a verb that would mean "to add pep and vigor to something." that doesn't seem likely to me. for one thing, there aren't really any verbs that mean "add pep and vigor to" besides "pep up" and "invigorate." (note that "invigorate" has a similar structure to "inchoate," except that the "in-" in "invigorate" is a locating prefix, not a negative prefix.) if "inchoate" means the same thing as "invigorate," which would need to be the case for (b) to be the right answer, then "cho" needs to mean "vigor" or "add vigor to." this isn't very likely to be the case--synonyms don't typically restate each other exactly, and there would be no need for a word "cho" that meant exactly the same thing as "vigor." the fact that i've never encountered the word "cho" in our daily life further suggests that it doesn't mean the same thing as vigor.</p>
<p>so what about "lugubrious"? we know that it's pretty much a 'pure adjective,' not a converted verb like "inchoate" probably is. we know it sounds pretty negative.</p>
<p>so which is easier to imagine: that "cho" means "vigor" and the proper word for the first blank should indicate that the verb "cho" hasn't been performed yet, or that "lugubrious" means something sad and negative like "not having a lot of pep" or "dirge-like"?</p>
<p>it's easier to see "lugubrious" going in there than "inchoate." so "lugubrious" is the one we want.</p>
<hr>
<p>now, that definitely seems like a needlessly complicated way to answer the question. i'll grant you that. but it only seems that long because i needed to write it out, and explain it in a way that might help it make sense to somebody who's never looked at a question that way before. as you practice this way of looking at questions, you'll find that you're able to recognize affixes and think of related words in much less time than it took to read and understand the above.</p>
<p>(i should also add that this particular question was a little more difficult to use this method on than most questions will be :) finally, it's worth noting that at least one online vocab list, at <a href="http://www.freevocabulary.com/%5B/url%5D">http://www.freevocabulary.com/</a> , doesn't include the word "lugubrious" and gives a bad definition for "inchoate," which suggests that it's possible that the memorization approach might leave you out of luck here, too. (i didn't check every vocab list on earth, just the one that came up first for "free sat vocabulary" on google.))</p>
<p>Very nice technique. What did you send in that inbox, eh!?! :)</p>
<p>haha. nothing--i just offered to help privately, as opposed to doing it on the board.</p>
<p>actually it turns out i've gotten a lot of requests for information on the way to do the above. i figured i'd answer here so that anybody else who reads the thread won't think i'm handing out some sort of secret documents or something.</p>
<p>there isn't anything to memorize in order to use the method i used above. you just need an understanding of the Sentence Completion rules and patterns on the SAT, and a little practice with pulling words apart.</p>
<p>basically, you just compare the beginning, ending, and middle of word you don't know to the beginning, ending, and middle of words you do know, and try to figure out how the target word might be put together. the more you practice it, the easier it gets. and as i've pointed out elsewhere on this board, the vast majority of the SAT words you don't know will have multiple syllables and lend themselves very nicely to this approach. it's not by accident.</p>
<p>thanks for the explanation, but i have another hard s.c.</p>
<p>His conduct at the state dinner was a cavalcade of blunders, one ------- following another until the evening ended.</p>
<p>(A) query (B) gibe (C) gaffe (D) tryst (E) tribute</p>
<p>I'm not sure if I'm using your method correctly, but here's my attempt:</p>
<p>Query seems similar to question; I've seen this word in context before, so I'm sure that (A) is out. (B), a gibe, I think this is an insult, so (B) is out. I don't know what gaffe or tryst mean, and (E) is out. Tryst might have a French origin, because it's similar to triste, which is love? i think, so i'd say that the answer is (C) gaffe.</p>
<p>The answer is (C). Mike, is this how you would approach this s.c.?</p>
<p>Wow!!! Looks very impressive to me. I see you handling this S.C easily.</p>
<p>well, it turns out that Mike's approach to the S.C. is what Collegeboard is looking for.</p>
<p>"Student uses a variety of skills to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words, including pronouncing words to trigger recognition; searching for related words with similar meanings; and analyzing prefixes, roots, and suffixes."</p>
<p>This is from the collegeboard site.</p>
<p>NICE! It's very close to what I would have done, sure. But that's the way it works--everybody will modify things a little bit on their own.</p>
<p>"triste" means "sad" in french, so you were off on the actual meaning of the word but, if this makes sense, dead-on in the way to approach it the question. if this were a math question or science question, i'd say you used the right method but just messed up on the calculation itself.</p>
<p>but still, the way you evaluted (a), (b), and (e) was great. and like i said, the idea behind approaching "tryst" was right, even if the french was a little off. well done! keep practicing!</p>
<p>(i should also add that "tryst" in english is a romantic affair, not a sadness. but that's okay. your goal with going to a possible cognate was to see if you could come up with any reason to like the target word for the answer choice, not to figure out what the word actually meant)</p>
<p>hey , when i first saw that question i could not figure out the meaning of "cavalcade of blunders" and therefore didn't have any " key word " to determine the right answer. However when i had a look at the answer choices i noticed gaffe and in my language that means "a terrible mistake" , so i thought that might be the right answer, and yes , it was. I wonder does gaffe mean the same in English or i was just lucky. Albanian and English aren't very similar though :(</p>
<p>that's what it means in English, too. the small amount of research i could do online suggests that "gaffe" is originally a french word that was adopted by both English and Albanian.</p>
<p>How would you use this method to find out if "gibe" is the wrong answer if you don't know it's definition? It's only one syllable, so there is no beginning, middle, or end. Help me please.</p>
<p>good question. in this situation, as stupid as it might sound, i'd recommend trying to think of other words with roots that sound or look like gibe. just sort of brainstorm here; no two people would necessarily think of the same words.</p>
<p>i can think of "jive" and "gibbon". you might think of other stuff. neither of these seems to fit well, so i still wouldn't be inclined to pick this one.</p>
<p>for "gaffe" i can only think of "gaff" from <em>life of pi</em> (a great book, by the way), which was a knife on a stick, kind of like a spear or something. also not much to go on.</p>
<p>if i found myself in the position of not really having any idea what was going on with a particular question, i'd just skip it and come back to it. if i still haven't thought of anything by the time i come back to it, then i'd leave it blank.</p>
<p>the thing to remember here is that this process is very personal. not everybody will come up with the same words, and not everybody will get every question right right away. it takes a little practice with real SAT questions to develop a rhythm.</p>
<p>people like baphomet, who speak albanian, will recognize gaffe right away from their own languages. that's quite an advantage on that particular question. a french student might also recognize the word. on the other hand, speaking or studying latin or greek may put you in a better position to answer other questions. it's like the math section--you have to be flexible about what they throw at you, and know that the test will continue repeating all the rules and patterns it has always repeated before. if you expect to find exactly the same arrangements of words, you'll be frustrated, just like if you expect to see exactly the same math questions. you have to rely on the fact that you'll be shown groups of words with inter-relationships similar to the inter-relationships you've seen in your practice.</p>
<p>as a general rule, though, the fact that a word only has one syllable doesn't have to be a deal-killer. you can still find words with similar syllables, and the words you find don't have to be mono-syllabic themselves. (for example, i thought of "gibbons" with "gibe" above. it didn't turn out to be much help, but that's still an okay way to think about it.)</p>
<p>not sure if that answers your question. does it?</p>
<p>Thanks, but it didn't really help. Questions like these (where I don't know or can't guess all the words) make me miss getting an 800 in CR by a point or two. Skipping the question doesn't necessarily bring me up to an 800 either, so I don't know what I should do in these situations.</p>
<p>Trois--maybe you should just, um, be happy with a 790 instead of an eight hundred?</p>
<p>That is what I usually get on QAS and such though. There's still room for improvement and you never know what you would really get on the actual test.</p>