Drill 20 · Reading & Writing · Hard Words in Context
SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Words in Context (Drill 20) is a Reading & Writing practice drill covering Hard Words in Context. It contains 5 original questions developed 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.
Question 1. The director's staging was admired less for any single striking image than for its ______: scene flowed into scene so smoothly that the audience never felt the machinery of the production at work.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word?
Explanation: (C) The signal that scenes flow smoothly and the seams stay hidden describes an easy, continuous quality, and that is what fluency names. (A) spectacle is the showy single image the sentence explicitly ranks below this quality. (B) austerity suggests plainness, but nothing marks the staging as bare or restrained. (D) novelty would praise freshness, while the admiration here is for smooth connection rather than invention.
Question 2. Ecologists were struck by how ______ the lake's recovery proved: within a few seasons of the cleanup, species that had vanished decades earlier returned in numbers no one had dared predict.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word?
Explanation: (B) The return of long-absent species in unexpectedly large numbers points to a strong and vigorous recovery, which robust captures. (A) gradual conflicts with the few seasons the sentence stresses. (C) partial undercuts a recovery the sentence describes as fuller than anyone predicted. (D) predictable contradicts the closing detail that no one had dared forecast the result.
Question 3. The following text is adapted from Edgar Allan Poe's 1844 story The Purloined Letter.
Such a man, I considered, could not fail to be aware of the ordinary modes of police action. He could not have failed to anticipate the waylayings to which he was subjected.
As used in the text, what does the word "anticipate" most nearly mean?
Explanation: (D) Dupin reasons that so shrewd a man would expect the ambushes in advance, so anticipate means to foresee. (A) welcome adds an eagerness the passage never supplies, since expecting a danger is not the same as wanting it. (B) hasten would mean bringing the ambushes on sooner, which runs against the wary foresight the reasoning describes. (C) prevent points to stopping the ambushes, but the man expects them rather than blocking them.
Question 4. Reviewers complained that the biography was oddly ______: it lavished pages on the subject's childhood pets while passing over the political career in a paragraph.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word?
Explanation: (A) The contrast between pages on pets and a single paragraph on a major career points to badly skewed emphasis, which disproportionate names. (B) fawning would fault the book for lavishing praise on its subject, but the problem is how the coverage is divided, not how admiring it is. (C) tedious would mean the book is dull; the complaint here is that the emphasis is badly out of proportion. (D) evasive implies a deliberate dodge, yet the sentence describes lopsided weighting rather than concealment.
Question 5. Far from being a quiet background presence, the new conductor was ______ in rehearsal: she stopped the orchestra constantly, reworking single bars until each phrase satisfied her.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word?
Explanation: (C) Because she halts the players repeatedly and reworks single bars, the sentence marks her as demanding and precise, which is what exacting means. (A) tentative reverses the picture of a conductor who intervenes constantly. (B) genial describes warmth of manner, not the rigor the sentence stresses. (D) erratic implies inconsistency, but her repeated reworking is methodical, not unpredictable.