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About This Drill
SAT Reading & Writing: Hard Words in Context (Drill 4) 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 committee's report was praised for its ______ tone: rather than condemning either side outright, it laid out the competing claims and left the judgment to readers.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word?
- Early reviewers found the symphony ______: its themes never recurred or built on one another, so the work struck them as a sequence of unrelated fragments rather than a unified whole.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word?
- The following text is adapted from Henry James's 1881 novel The Portrait of a Lady.
She had a great desire for knowledge, but she really preferred almost any source of information to the printed page; she had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.
As used in the text, what does the word "curiosity" most nearly mean?
- Although the negotiator appeared ______ in public, repeating that no concession was possible, privately she had already drafted the terms of a compromise.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word?
- The essayist's late prose grew increasingly ______: where his early work spelled out every step of an argument, these final pieces gesture toward conclusions and trust the reader to supply the connections.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word?