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About This Drill
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 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
- 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?
- 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?
- 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?
- 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?
- 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?