<p>after making that post, i thought it might make a little more sense to show you what i'm talking about a little more concretely, using the question you originally posted:</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>we know from the structure of the prompt that the word in the blank will mean something very close "raising their voices and pretending to swoon," and that it has something to do with "tense moments." since "tense" is pretty much a negative word, we can expect that the word in the blank will also have a negative connotation. so we're looking for a negative word that has something to do with loud voices, swooning, acting, and melodrama.</p>
<p>(a) seems to have the suffixes (suffices?) "-ious" and "-ness," with the rest of the word being "imper-" (possible with a prefix "im-," possibly not). what goes with the root "imper"? we can think of similar words like "imperial," "empire," or "imperative." if you know latin, maybe you know the word "imperator," which (i think?) is what caesar called himself (haven't taken latin in 15 years, so forgive me if i'm wrong). none of those things seems to have anything to do with acting, tenseness, or swooning, so this probably isn't a good choice.</p>
<p>(b) here we recognize a suffix "-able" and the rest of the word "inscrut," possibly with a prefix "in-", which might leave the root "scrut." we might think of the word "scrutiny," as in the phrase "public scrutiny," or we might think of "scrupulous"--is that similar? who knows? let's look at the affixes, too--if "-able" is a suffix that means you can do something to something else, and "in-" often means "the opposite of x," then "inscrutable" could mean "unable to be scruted," whatever "scruted" means. does it seem likely that actors would become "unable to be scruted" when they wanted to "emphasize tense moments?" who would be scruting them, or not scruting them? it seems unlikely that this is the right choice.</p>
<p>(c) an earlier poster already mentioned what seems like a prefix "con-," which usually means "with" or "together" (we know this from spanish, maybe, or just from knowing english words like "condensation," "converge," "congregation," and so on). there's also probably a root "viv," which we could recognize from french or spanish as meaning "live." so there's a good chance that this word has something, on some level, to do with the ideas of life and togetherness, neither one of which has anything to do with swooning, actors, melodrama, tensensess, or anything else in the question.</p>
<p>(d) this seems to have the compound suffix "-ionic" on it, with a root "hist-" or "histr-." an earlier poster already mentioned that this might lead you to think of "hysterics." if you know french or spanish, you might recognize the cognates "histoire" and "historia," respectively, both of which mean "story," which at least has something to do with the idea of acting, melodrama, and so on (more than anything else has so far, anyway).</p>
<p>(e) we can probably recognize a root "solicit" and an suffix "-ous." you've probably seen signs in offices that say "no soliciting," which suggests that soliciting is unwanted behavior, which seems to go along with the negative connotation of the word in the blank. but does it make sense that soliciting would involve swooning and yelling? why would someone want to go into an office and swoon and yell?</p>
<p>that leaves us with (a), (b), and (c) as very weak candidates. (d) seems like it could be related to storytelling and, if we managed to think of "hysterics" as a cognate, also seems like it could have a negative connotation and be associated with extreme behavior. (e) seems to have a negative connotation, but doesn't seem related to the idea of swooning, tenseness, or drama. if we're familiar with the SAT's design and reasonably sure of the cognates and things we identified, (d) has to be the right answer, even if we don't actually know what (d) means.</p>
<p>compare this approach with learning the 1000 sparknotes words available here:</p>
<p><a href="http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:-UevkljIi1AJ:img.sparknotes.com/content/testprep/pdf/sat.vocab.pdf+sat+word+list+sparknotes&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us%5B/url%5D">http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:-UevkljIi1AJ:img.sparknotes.com/content/testprep/pdf/sat.vocab.pdf+sat+word+list+sparknotes&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us</a></p>
<p>that list doesn't have the words "inscrutable" or "histrionics" in it.</p>
<p>so if you memorized the sparknotes list, when you come to this question you'll still have to come up with some alternative strategy or skip the question.</p>
<p>you might protest that you wouldn't be able to think of all the cognates or identify the roots that i identified. that may be. this is why you have to practice. but practicing the technique above will take less time than memorizing 1000 words, and will pay dividends on every single real SAT question, which memorization will not do.</p>