<p>Once he had ___ sufficient ____ information, Randall felt confident in publishing his daring article incriminating the local politician</p>
<ol>
<li>written…substantial</li>
<li>obtained…corroborating</li>
</ol>
<p>The right answer is 2, but I chose 1. I see why 2 is right, but I don’t see why 1 is wrong. Can someone explain?? Thanks :)</p>
<p>Written doesn’t really work, since that doesn’t really relate to evidence. And he wouldn’t necessarily ‘write’ the article before ‘publishing it’, since that’s kind of redundant.</p>
<p>Substantial doesn’t fit at all. You ‘gain a substantial amount of weight’, you don’t ‘gather substantial evidence.’ That’s not really how the word substantial works. And besides, corroborate is the perfect word; it means ‘support a story/hypothesis’, which is exactly what this sentence is asking for.</p>
<p>Basically, you OBTAIN evidence, and you CORROBORATE stories. That wasn’t a very good explanation lol, SC’s are tough to explain since it’s mostly intuitive understandings of words that are harder to express than math-related stuff.</p>
<p>Also note the directions:</p>
<p>“Choose the word or set of words that, when inserted in the sentence, best fits the meaning of the sentence as a whole”</p>
<p>Maybe you could make a (relatively weak) argument that 1 makes sense, but 2 is definitely correct and there can be no argument otherwise.</p>
<p>I think “written” is wrong because you do not write information. You can “write information down” for someone, but it’s incorrect English to say something like “I wrote information” or “he writes information.”</p>
<p>Saying “I write information” is completely valid in the English language, it just isn’t a commonly used phrase so it “sounds” wrong to most.</p>
<p>Where did this question come from?</p>
<p>Some of the explanations above regarding why choice 1 is “wrong” seem to miss the big picture of CR questions. These are not grammar or idiom usage questions. Those are in the writing section.</p>
<p>Look at the second clause: “Randall felt confident in publishing his daring article incriminating the local politician”.</p>
<p>Ask yourself: “What would you need to do so that you would feel confident to publish such an article?”</p>
<p>The short answer “You would need to do research to make sure that you have your facts right – i.e. basic journalism. Research the issues, and check the claims”. That’s choice 2.</p>
<p>This in my opinion is a very typical SAT question.</p>