Which 1 should i start with ??

Godfatherbob
Sat, 03 Jan 2009 12:28:08 +0000

It increases your general comprehension of writing while forcing you to put the words in a context to properly understand the piece.



Yes, and reading is a great way to help your reading comprehension skills. However, reading comprehension does not help you with SC questions if you don’t know what the answer choices mean.



at least 2, if not 3 or 4, of the answer choices in each one can usually be eliminated out of common knowledge and/or logical deduction



Yes, in most questions you can generally eliminate 2 answer choices. (This is not true on many level 5 questions, however). And if you choose not to memorize lists of SAT words, this leaves you to guess among 3 answer choices, giving you a 33% of getting that question right–and that’s assuming you didn’t falsely eliminate a choice. The idea behind memorizing big lists of SAT words (not random words you may find in the New York Times) is to increase your “chances” of getting difficult SC questions that contain 5 answer choices you’re familiar with. The reading comprehension required for SC questions is minimal, especially compared with that required for Passage questions.



If you have to memorize lists out of compulsion, then at least create a sentence that fits the vocab word in, and make a list of its synonyms and antonyms, it’ll help you remember the word, and train your mind to think about a word fully.



But if you have a compulsion to prepare yourself to answer SC questions correctly, don’t spend your time doing this, unless you have over a year to prep (which isn’t extremely uncommon). Depending on your level of vocabulary you’ll need to memorize between 300 and 3000 words in order to have a decent chance at getting every SC question right.

The bad news is that there is no way around it: you must memorize lists of words.

The good news is that the SAT is very pattern-orientated. Once you start memorizing “SAT words” you’ll find that the number of words you don’t know among those 19 SC questions gets smaller and smaller.