<p>How do you propose answering vocab questions if you don't know the vocab in the first place?</p>
<p>How would you tackle this:</p>
<p>Actors in melodramas often emphasized tense moments by being ______, for example, raising their voices and pretending to swoon.</p>
<p>A - imperious
B - inscrutable
C - convivial
D - Histrionic
E - Solicitious</p>
<p>Imagine you don't know a SINGLE word out of the choices</p>
<p>Would the answer be D - Histrionic?</p>
<p>No, I'm not one who is against vocab. I've memorized 437 words and counting.</p>
<p>I know for a fact that the answer is niether A or B.</p>
<p>Did your memorization help you eliminate A and B? And yes, the answer is D</p>
<p>GardenMaiden, when are you taking the SAT next? And will it be your first time? And when did you start preparing for it?</p>
<p>Yes, my memorization did actually help to eliminate A and B. I remember learning the meaning of those two words before, but I couldn't quite remember their meanings right now. However, I knew the word in the blank had to relate to something like "overly dramatic", and I somewhat knew that imperious and inscrutable had NOTHING to do with drama.</p>
<p>I guessed between C, D, and E. I learned convivial too, but I, again, forgot the meaning. I was pretty sure it didn't have any relations with the sentence though, so I just guessed between the last two and chose D.</p>
<p>I'm going to take the SAT in October (89 days, I should study harder instead of being on here. D: ). No, this isn't my first time but rather my second. I got a 1550 the first time I took it in June (CR: 460 M: 510 WR: 580). I'm (God Willing) trying to aim for a 2100+ when I take it again in the fall. </p>
<p>I started preparing for my first June SAT from the last two weeks of Janurary. So about 5 months of non-stop studying. I started around July 3rd to study for my second SAT. </p>
<p>I actually find memorizing vocabulary to be a lot better than learning roots, prefixes, and suffixes (and a lot less confusing!). The only problem is - after so many words - barely any of them came on my first SAT exam. Just a few of them. So this time I'm trying to find a list of words that are FOR SURE going to appear on the SAT. Do you happen to know of any?</p>
<p>Is this going to be your first time taking the SAT, or the second time?</p>
<p>P.S - You got that question from the CB Official SAT Study Guide didn't you? Lol, I remembered the sentence but not the answer.</p>
<p>I did not memorize and I just knew the answer because I have a pretty good vocabulary and "histrionic" was the word that came to mind.</p>
<p>But if you knew none of those, you could use logic. C, "convivial", can easily be seen to mean "with life" and therefore not be the answer. You can figure out that "inscrutable" has something to do with "scrutiny." A and E are more difficult to eliminate, but it isn't too difficult to ascertain that "histrionic" has the same etymology as "hysterical" or "hysterics," and would therefore be the correct response.</p>
<p>Buy the "Not So Scarey Vocab" CD and listen to it....comes highly recommended.</p>
<p>I didn't know the meanings of 4 out 5 of those words and got it right. That just sounded right to me, but I'm not against memorizing vocab if it helps you that's great.</p>
<p>My intent is not to censure those who advocate no-memorization but rather to grasp how vocab questions can be done without knowing the vocab</p>
<p>CollegeInfo: ETS wants people to pick "What feels right," and so using that approach can't be a good thing</p>
<p>I am brute-force memorizing 1300 words in 30 days time. Pretty easy, so why NOT do it? ^ is true as well.</p>
<p>d is the only word i didn't know
but it was good enough for me to answer</p>
<p>just have good vocab.. no need to memorize everything just for SAT, i mean if you memorize everything in a short span of time everything just convolute... not good</p>
<p>you don't need amazing vocab to get them all right....
lots of it is logic
knowing 3-4 per question is good enough</p>
<p>i am pretty against memorizing 3500... just not needed.. better of with practice on the passages
but if it's like those 400 word hot lists.. is not really a problem</p>
<p>sometimes, just watch out for words you don't know in everyday life.. you'll just have a better vocabulary</p>
<p>I've never memorized a vocab word in my life and the answer jumped out at me. I don't see the point in imagining that I don't know any of those words, because simple logic helps me solve the problem in a snap.</p>
<p>Imperious - Sounds like imperial. Not what we're looking for.
Inscrutable - Cryptic. Obscure. Hard to understand.
Convival - Sounds kinda like company. Doesn't fit.
Histrionic - Dunno what it means, but it's the only one that could remotely work.
Solicitous - Sounds like solicitor.</p>
<p>I got a 760 on the CR section without once studying a single vocab list. You know what worked for me? Reading books. You should try it sometime. I knew what all of the above words meant because I'd read them and could place them in context.</p>
<p>Reading books would help if you start doing it 3 years before the SAT. As far as starting it 3 months before, how much would that help?</p>
<p>good question, amu.</p>
<p>while i'm strongly against memorizing vocab, i acknowledge that it seems to help some people, or at least that people seem to feel it helps. my problems with the process are the following:</p>
<ol>
<li>there are easier ways to achieve good results than memorization</li>
<li>sentence-completion questions aren't actually vocabulary questions, though they may seem to be vocabulary questions when you first look at them.</li>
<li>brute-force memorization usually leads to "thesaurus mouth" in the essays (and in life)</li>
</ol>
<p>i'll explain below:</p>
<ol>
<li> no matter how much vocabulary you study, you will come across words on the SAT that you don't know. when that happens, you'll need some sort of back-up strategy to try to figure out what's going on. so my theory is just to focus on the back-up strategy and expect to use it exclusively whenever i see a difficult question.</li>
</ol>
<p>xiggi's earlier research on SAT vocabulary (i don't know if he's still doing it) concluded that the Barron's list had something like 1% accuracy in predicting the words that would be on a future SAT. this is because the barron's list reflects the words that have already appeared on the SAT, and there's no pool of SAT words that the college board has to use on every test (as there is a pool of math concepts and a pool of grammar concepts that it must draw every math or writing question from). if there were such a pool of vocabulary words, the vocabulary lists people use to get ready for the SAT wouldn't change all the time, but they do.</p>
<p>memorizing 5000 words takes most people a decent amount of time, and the 1% return on that time for any given test isn't worth it, in my opinion. i'd rather use far less time focusing on taking words apart like d4r did above. more on that in item 2.</p>
<ol>
<li> though sentence-completion questions appear to test vocabulary, they're actually a poor instrument for that. if the college board wanted to test your vocabulary, there are for more direct ways to do that. they could give you a list of ten words after the essay section and ask you to write out what they mean, for example--that would be a vocabulary test. but that isn't what they do.</li>
</ol>
<p>if the sc questions were intended to test your vocabulary, the vocabulary they tested would have to be standardized. but, as xiggi's research shows, that vocabulary isn't standardized: different words appear on different test days. if it were about vocabulary, my 800 verbal from one day and an 800 verbal from another day wouldn't represent the same thing, since the two scores would have been achieved using different vocabulary words. this means the college board is trying to standardize the sc questions for something else besides vocabulary.</p>
<p>what can that "something else" be? we can get clues from looking at the structure of real SAT sc questions. you'll notice that the "difficult" words have many syllables, for one thing, and are derived from romance languages (this description fits every answer choice in the question at the beginning of this thread). these words can be de-constructed using a basic knowledge of english context, any romance language, and english morphology (suffixes, prefixes, parts of speech, and so on). while such de-construction is difficult in the beginning, after a little practice it becomes a lot easier--and it gives you a tool you can use with confidence on any real SAT sc question.</p>
<p>if the SAT were out to test your vocabulary, it would use words like "thewy" and "lief," words of only a few syllables with derivations that almost nobody would know. such words would be just about impossible to deconstruct.</p>
<ol>
<li> finally, we come to the greater problem of memorizing vocabulary in itself. the memorization strategy employed by most people works well for learning words in a foreign language, but not too well for people learning advanced or obscure words in their own language. this is because advanced words aren't pure synonyms for simpler words, but that's how most people tend to learn them. this leads to "thesaurus mouth," that false sense of accomplishment and destroyer of clarity that you see all over the place when you edit high school writing. people learn, for example, that "abrogate" means the same thing as "repeal," which might help a little bit if you ever saw "abrogate" on the SAT (see item 1), because, from a multiple-choice perspective, "abrogate" and "repeal" are close enough in meaning that either one would do for an answer choice. but thinking that "abrogate" and "repeal" mean the same thing in real life, outside the context of a multiple-choice question, will get you into trouble. if you use "abrogate" as a substitution for "repeal," the usage will seem awkward to a reader who actually knows how to use both words. this is because words in the same language aren't just code-words for each other: you can't substitute one for another without subtly changing the meaning.</li>
</ol>
<p>this is why learning individual words as substitutes for other words only really works when you're trying to learn a foreign language. english "table," french "table," and hungarian "asztal" all mean pretty much the same thing, so it's okay to learn "asztal" = "table." but it's not true that "abrogate" = "repeal" in the same way; the former has a shade of despotism to it that the latter lacks.</p>
<p>i gotta run, but that's the basic argument against memorizing sat vocab words.</p>
<p>I never did memorization, I don't read at all, and I knew what all those words meant.</p>
<p>There is no doubt that memorization is worth it as long as you don't start trying to memorize 3500 wordlists or the dictionary. And the power of the english language is that abrogate means to abolish, usually with authority. Thus "thesaurus mouth" only happens when you memorize a partial definition- or the wrong definition in the case of it meaning "to repeal". So thus I can say that slavery was abrogated.</p>
<p>So if memorizing isn't the solution, what is? Practicing the "backup method" you referenced on questions?</p>
<p>The break-down method is a bad idea. CB knows that kids know that "a-" means not, so they will throw on words like atrocious. Some kid will think "oh, a=not tro=light and cious indicates a state of being----so it has to mean someone that is dark". Solely breaking a word down will only get you in the 600 range on the CR.</p>
<p>I took a psych class. Histrionic personality disorder was covered in it.</p>
<p>The CR asks you to select the correct word IN CONTEXT within the passage being cited. There are so many nuances of any given word when used in one situation or another -- I just can't imagine that memorizing a list will help you place the right word into the right context for the CR. Back when the Analogies section was still included on the SAT, studying vocab was a much more productive exercise, because one needed to know the definitions more prescisely and without the aid of context. (I studied vocab and roots myself when I had to take the SAT w/analogies.)</p>
<p>Read, read, read. The New York Times, Wash Post, current events magazines (I really recommend The Atlantic, The New Yorker and The Economist). They are well-written and present sophisticated langauge and ideas. It doesn't have to be dull, dry literature. </p>
<p>DS1 never looked at a vocab list. Didn't hurt him at all. He is a voracious reader, mainly of science fiction.</p>