Tài liệu Explanations for SAT 2 docx

Explanations – SAT Practice Test 2
VERBAL
1. C The important idea in this sentence is that the woman “lost herself in her
work,” which means it must have been “inspiring” (A), “complex” (B) or
“absorbing”(C), not “exhausting” (D) or “repetitive”(E). If she were really
involved in her work, she would have been ignorant of the noise around her.
This rules out (A) and (B); if the work were “inspiring” or “complex” she
wouldn’t be “annoyed by” or “involved in” the noise. (C) works: her work
was so “absorbing” that she was completely “oblivious to” the noise.
2. C “In contrast to” is the signal; that there is the difference between the piranhas’
image and the reality that many species of piranha are vegetarian. The word in
the blank has to emphasize the piranha’s image as a carnivore. (C),
“voracious,” or “greedy, ravenous, having a huge appetite,” works best.
“Nomadic” (A) means “moving from place to place”; “lugubrious” (B) means
“mournful”; (D) “covetous” means “eagerly desiring something belonging to
someone else.” (E) might have been tempting, but the fact that piranhas seem
“exotic” has nothing to do with their diet.
3. A This sentence has quite a bit of verbiage that you can ignore. The important
thing to see is that there is a contrast between the “modern, ---- subway
stations” and the “graceful curves” of the old buildings. The word in the blank,
therefore, has to be something like “rectangular.” (A), “rectilinear,” which
means “characterized by straight lines” is the only one of the choices that
provides the necessary contrast.
4. B The structural clue “while” alerts you that vetiver does not have a disruptive
impact on the local ecology like kudzu does. A good prediction for th blank
would then b “negative,” because vetiver has “no negative effects.“ The only
good match for this prediction among the choices is (B), “adverse,” which
means “unfavorable.” Vetiver clearly has “foreseeable” (A) and
“advantageous” (E) effects because it controls soil erosion, so these choices are
wrong. (C), “domestic,” doesn’t make sense in the sentence. Since you don’t
know whether kudzu’s impact on the ecology is permanent, (D) doesn’t fit

either.
5. E Concentrate on the second blank first. It stands to reason that Douglass would
pattern his autobiography after Equiano’s own “autobiography” or “life story.”
The only choice that has a second-blank word coming even close to this
prediction is (E), “consciously..narrative,” “Consciously” fits well into the first
blank, too; Gates think that Douglass patterned his autobiography after
Equiano’s narrative “consciously,” or “on purpose.” (E) is the correct answer.
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“patronizingly” (A) means “condescendingly.” An “epitaph” (D) is the
“inscription on a tomb or grave.”
6. D The first blank has to be consistent with “lived a lonely life”; you can predict a
word like “uncommunicativeness.” This rules out (B) “career” and (E)
“gregariousness,” which means “sociability.” SInce Houseman did let a few
close friends into his life, these friends must have been able to “get past” the
“uncommunicativeness.” The choice that matches these predictions is (D),
“reserve... penetrate.” “Reserve” is restraint in one”s words and actions.” (A)
is out because close friends would not “spurn,” or disdainfully reject,”
Houseman. “Seclusion” works in (C), but “observe” doesn’t make any sense in
the second blank.
7. B Narrowing your focus helps with this sentence. Look at the phrase “patriotic
and other ---- cliches.” The first blank has to be a word for a category that
“patriotic” falls into, such as “ideological” (B). For the second blank, you can
infer that in an impersonal world, relief will come from occasional “displays”
of emotion. (B), “ideological..manifestations,” has what you need to fill the
blanks. “Pragmatic,” which mens “practical,” doesn’t work in the first blank,
and “absences” is the opposite of what we want in the second blank.
“Ephemeral” (D) means “lasting a very short time,” while “vestiges” (E) means
“trace or makes left by something.”
8. C The semi-colon in the middle of the sentence tells you that the two halves of
the sentence have similar meanings. If a plan has “caused widespread

resentment,” then it has few elements that will “make the party popular” with
the electorate. We need a word that means “make popular.” “Ingratiate” )C)
means “to gain favor or acceptance”; it’s the only choice that has the predicted
meaning. To “consolidate” (B) is to “join together into one whole or to
strengthen,” and the party doesn’t want to merge with the electorate, so (B)’s
out. “Involve” (A) gives you a strange sentence when you plug it in. A
political party is always involved with the electorate. “Deprecate” (D), to
“express disapproval,” doesn’t make sense in the context of the sentence. (E)
“impeach,” “to charge with a crime, especially the crime of misconduct in a
public office” might have tricked you because it’s a word that fits in with the
political subject matter of the sentence. But it doesn’t fit in with the meaning
of the sentence.
9. C This is particularly difficult question, which you can anticipate because it
comes at the end of the set. Several of the choices look good at first, which is
why you have to look carefully at the sentence. You need an adjective
describing the students who founded the literacy movement. They all had
come from French-speaking colonies to live in France; so they were
“expatriate” students, (C), which means “exiled from or living outside of one”s
country.” The word “expatriate” derives from the root PATER, or “father”
which is also found in “paternal.” And the prefix “EX” means “out.” So to
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move out from your “fatherland” or native country is to “EX-patriate.”
“Laconic” (B) means “not talkative” and doesn’t fit the context. The students
may have been “radical” (D) or “sophisticated” (E), but the evidence in the
sentence that they were “expatriated” is much stronger.
10. C The WRIST is the joint that attaches the HAND to the rest of the body, in the
same way that the ANKLE is the joint that attaches the FOOT to the rest of the
body. None of the other pairs of words int he choices fits into the stem bridge.
11. E A good stem bridge here is “to REVERE someone is to ADMIRE that person
intensely.” Analogously, to “scrutinize” something is to “examine” it

intensely. “Think” and “ponder,” in (C), are synonyms; there is no difference
in degree of intensity. In (B), to “delay” something a great deal is not to
“cancel” it.
12. A A HEDONIST is primarily occupied with the pursuit of PLEASURE; a
“philosopher” is primarily occupied with the pursuit of “knowledge.” In (B), a
“stenographer,” knows “shorthand” and in (C), a “physicist” studies
“energy,” but they are not, by definition, primary occupied with these things. In
(D) a “progressive” wants social improvement through government action, not
necessarily “liberty.”
13. E When something is being UNEARTHed, the process is called EXCAVATION
(digging something out and removing it). Similarly, “imprisoning” someone is
the process of INCARCERATION. In (A), the process of “addition” does not
always involve “constructing.” In (D), “imposition” is “the act of imposing.”
“Demanding” something is not imposing something on someone, so this pair of
words doesn’t work.
14. C Something that is ABSTRUSE is by definition difficult to UNDERSTAND.
Likewise, something that is OBSCURED is difficult to SEE. Things that are
“unusable” (A) can still be changed; things that are “faulty” are not always
difficult to “fix” (B); things that are “irrelevant” (D) may be easy to “prove.”
None of these has a bridge that matches the stem bridge. “Tepid” (A) means
“lukewarm,” not “difficult to heat.”
15. B You may have been tempted to pick the wrong answer if you didn’t make your
stem bridge specific enough. To say that “s SILO is a place that holds GRAIN”
leaves you with both (B) and (E) as possible right answers. The bridge you
need is “a SILO is a place where GRAIN is stored.” Nobody stores water in a
well, which eliminates (E), but a “pantry” is a place where “food” is stored, so
(B)’s bridge is the one that matches the stem bridge.
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Writer Pair
Just a reminder about general strategy: read the first passage and do the

questions relating to it (questions 1-5 in this case), then read the second passage
and do the rest of the questions. These two passages are not that difficult to get
through, and the authors’ points of view on the process of writing contrast
clearly and sharply. The author of Passage 1 believes that the writer
experiences his writing as an “act of discovery” which is not in his power to
control. When the writer finds the proper tone of voice for his writing, he enters
some sort of magical state in which “sentences mysteriously shape themselves”
right before his eyes. After he is finished, he will feel “that there is an order to
things, and that he himself is part of that order.” The author of Passage 2, on
the other hand, approaches his writing “as if it were a job like any other.” He
ascribes “dangerous” notions like that of the author of Passage 1 to the
influence of the nineteenth-century Romantic movement. Writing to him is
“hard labor with no guaranteed reward.” Although being a good writer takes
talent, it also requires a lot of difficult learning and, for him at least, “an
enormous amount of bruising self-questioning.”
16. C The author of Passage 1 says that unless a writer is “writing mechanically,” he
experiences his writing as an act of discovery. “Mechanically” is used here in
the sense of “unimaginatively” (C). None of the other choices works in the
context of the sentence.
17. E Reading a few lines up from the reference to “unlocking the floodgates,” you
find the author asserting that creative writing is “not within the power of [the
writer’s] will to summon forth” or to resist. When he talks about how to
“unlock the floodgates,” then, he is suggesting that creative writing is “in part
beyond the writer’s conscious control” (E). The author of Passage 1 never says
that almost anyone can be a writer (A), that writing derives its power from
depicting dramatic events (C), or that it requires a rigid sense of structure and
form (D). He does suggest that writing can be very difficult (B), but not until
the end of the passage.
18. C In lines 16-25, the author describes his vision of what happens when the writer
finds the right tone of voice for his writing: he sits and watches as sentences

and paragraphs mysteriously form themselves, etc. What is being conveyed
here is the writer’s sense of “wonder at the seemingly magical process of
creation” (C). You probably could have picked out (C) without going back to
the passage, simply by eliminating the other choices. The author of Passage 1
never talks about “frustration at the unpredictability of writing” (A) or about
“discovering an unsuspected talent” (D) . A writer is driven by a “dim vision”
and does not seem to need to plan a project (B). Writing is “hard labor” (E) to
the author of Passage 2, not the author of Passage 1.
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19. A Look at the context in which “dim” appears. The author is poetically describing
what happens during creative writing: “...paragraphs begin to shape themselves
into an organically coherent pattern that corresponds only better, much better to
the dim vision which had driven him to his desk in the first place.” Cutting
through the flowery language, you see that the writer only has a vague idea of
what he wants to write when he sits down, but things get much clearer once he
starts to write. “Dim” is used in the sense of “vague” (A).
20. A Re-reading the sentence at the end of the third paragraph should be enough to
enable you to pick out the right choice. It is “the writer’s search for order,”
according to the author, “...which exists not only in poems and stories, but in
any form of writing, however humble or trivial.” (A) paraphrases this nicely.
The other choices may seem to be plausible general reasons for referring to
different forms of writing, but they don’t work in the context of Passage 1.
21. B As with the previous question, all of the choices here seem like plausible
reasons for adopting a “professional attitude to writing.” Only one can fit what
the author actually says, though–which is that the only way he can “ensure a
consistent output is to approach writing as if it were a job like any other.” He
wants to “maintain a high level of productivity” (B).
22. D In lines 50-68, the author of Passage 2 attacks the “dangerous misconceptions”
that many people have about the creative process of writing. The problem, he
states, is that we still believe the “fanciful notions” of the Romantic movement.

“Fanciful” clearly has a negative connotation here, which makes “unrealistic”
(D) the best choice.
23. B As we saw in the last question, the author of Passage 2 launches an attack on
the Romantics and their fanciful notions about artistic creativity. His main
target is Coleridge, whose work led to the belief “that the creation of art is
unlike every other form of human productivity”–an idea the author doesn’t
agree with at all. The author is suggesting, therefore, that Coleridge’s writings
“propagated erroneous ideas about artistic creativity” (B). The author himself,
not Coleridge, emphasizes the “role of maturity in an artist,” so (A) is out. (C)
is wrong because the author thinks that Coleridge spread false ideas about art,
not that Coleridge “exaggerated the importance of the arts.” Furthermore, there
is no suggestion in the passage that Coleridge ignored how long it takes to learn
writing skills (D) or that he exalted experience over talent (E).
24. D The author of Passage 2 compares writing to “breaking rocks to look for gold”
in emphasizing that writing is hard work with no guaranteed reward. Looking
through the answer choices, the one that echoes this sentiment most reasonably
is (D). The author does think that writing requires unusual talent (A), but that
has nothing to do with his analogy. (B) is far too extreme, while (C) is out
because the author is not considering here what other people think of writers.
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