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About This Drill
SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Words in Context (Drill 11) is a Reading & Writing practice drill covering Hard Words in Context. It contains 5 original questions created by Brian Stewart, a Barron's test prep author with over 20 years of tutoring experience.
Hard SAT Words in Context questions ask you to choose the word or phrase that most precisely completes the sentence. The answer is rarely an obscure word; difficulty comes from three plausible distractors that all nearly fit, with one signal in the sentence pinning the correct choice.
Questions in This Drill
- Critics expected the seismic-retrofit code to be ______, but its drafters had deliberately left key thresholds open so that engineers could adapt them to local soil conditions.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word?
- Far from being permanent, a glacier is best understood as ______: it gains mass from snowfall at its head and loses it to melt at its snout, never holding the same form for long.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word?
- The following text is adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novel Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable.
As used in the text, what does the word "lovable" most nearly mean?
- A camera lens with a wide aperture renders distant background objects ______, an effect portrait photographers prize because it isolates the subject against a soft wash of color.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word?
- Although the beetle's armored shell looks ______, entomologists have shown it is built from microscopic interlocking layers that flex under pressure rather than shattering.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word?