sample SAT sentence-completion exercise

After 2016, the SAT's format was changed, and I'm not up on that, so I don't know whether sentence completion is still part of the new format. (I stopped tutoring the SAT in 2013.) Below is a 15-question battery of sentence-completion questions (found here) for you to try. A regular student would have only 12 minutes to get through the battery, so time yourself if you want, or just go through the questions at a leisurely pace. When I was hired by that tutoring center in Centreville, Virginia, they made me run through an entire SAT to see whether I qualified to work there. I'm pretty sure I scored at least a 700 in both the math and the verbal sections (I could confirm by checking my blog's archives). In my case, the test was untimed, so I'd never insist that you time yourself here. Give these questions a try, and I'll have the answers at the end of this post, whited-out. Highlight them to see them. Good luck!

1. Architects define a physical structure as a set of materials arranged in such a way that these materials can ------- the downward pull of gravity.

A. mimic
B. resist
C. amplify
D. dislodge
E. demonstrate

2. Just when the senator's opponent had ------- the lead in popularity polls, public opinion -------; as a result, the incumbent senator regained her front-runner position.

A. taken . . stabilized
B. challenged . . waned
C. captured . . shifted
D. conceded . . vacillated
E. relinquished . . changed

3. Any biographer of this playwright, who assumed an elaborate public facade in order to conceal private concerns, must examine the impulse behind such -------.

A. artifice
B. joviality
C. conceit
D. disbelief
E. erudition

4. It is said that as a legal team Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall complemented each other thoroughly: Houston's sedate manner was ------- Marshall's -------.

A. analagous to . . trepidation
B. commensurate with . . formality
C. tempered by . . jocularity
D. adverse to . . gregariousness
E. superseded by . . inquisitiveness

5. Conflicting standards for allowable radiation levels in foods made ------- appraisals of the damage to crops following the reactor meltdown extremely difficult.

A. reliable
B. private
C. intrusive
D. conscious
E. inflated

6. The student's feelings about presenting the commencement address were -------; although visibly happy to have been chosen, he was nonetheless ------- about speaking in public.

A. positive . . insecure
B. euphoric . . hopeful
C. unknown . . modest
D. ambivalent . . anxious
E. restrained . . confident

7. Alice Walker's The Temple of My Familiar, far from being a tight, ------- narrative, is instead ------- novel that roams freely and imaginatively over a half-million years.

A. traditional . . a chronological
B. provocative . . an insensitive
C. forceful . . a concise
D. focused . . an expansive
E. circuitous . . a discursive

8. In a society that abhors -------, the nonconformist is persistently -------.

A. creativity . . glorified
B. rebelliousness . . suppressed
C. insurgency . . heeded
D. smugness . . persecuted
E. stagnation . . denigrated

9. The board members, accustomed to the luxury of being chauffeured to corporate meetings in company limousines, were predictably ------- when they learned that this service had been -------.

A. satisfied . . annulled
B. stymied . . extended
C. displeased . . upheld
D. disgruntled . . suspended
E. concerned . . provided

10. Both by ------- and by gender, American painter Mary Cassatt was an -------, because her artistic peers were Frenchmen.

A. background . . amateur
B. citizenship . . intellectual
C. nationality . . anomaly
D. style . . advocate
E. skill . . expert

11. Only if business continues to expand can it ------- enough new jobs to make up for those that will be ------- by automation.

A. produce . . required
B. invent . . introduced
C. create . . eliminated
D. repeal . . reduced
E. formulate . . engendered

12. Trinkets intended to have only ------- appeal can exist virtually forever in landfills because of the ------- of some plastics.

A. arbitrary . . scarcity
B. theoretical . . resilience
C. ephemeral . . durability
D. obsessive . . fragility
E. impetuous . . cheapness

13. The editor expected her reporters to be -------, but the number of ------- in the articles submitted clearly showed that her expectations were often not met.

A. impartial . . clichés
B. frank . . predictions
C. decisive . . facts
D. creative . . errors
E. accurate . . misquotations

14. Many people find Stanley Jordan's music not only entertaining but also -------; listening to it helps them to relax and to ------- the tensions they feel at the end of a trying day.

A. soothing . . heighten
B. therapeutic . . alleviate
C. sweet . . underscore
D. exhausting . . relieve
E. interesting . . activate

15. Instead of presenting a balanced view of both sides of the issue, the speaker became increasingly -------, insisting on the correctness of his position.

A. inarticulate
B. dogmatic
C. elliptical
D. tactful
E. ambiguous

[ANSWERS (highlight to see): 1. B, 2. C, 3. A, 4. C, 5. A, 6. D, 7. D, 8. B, 9. D, 10. C, 11. C, 12. C, 13. E, 14. B, 15. B]

Credit to CrackSAT (with its inadvertently humorous name) for the above question. If you run through the test at the above link, instead of here on the blog, you can submit your answers and receive comprehensive answer explanations—why such-and-such is right or wrong.

There's a lot of debate as to whether the SAT and other standardized tests do anything more than measure test-taking ability, which doesn't necessarily correlate to life-skills; I at least somewhat agree with this accusation, and test success is no determiner of success in life. I have, however, seen a convincing number of studies that correlate SAT scores with one's IQ. Since IQ is a measure of intelligence, and much of intelligence involves reasoned problem-solving, this makes a certain amount of sense. But having a high IQ is also not a determiner of life-success. Look at me and my brother David: I'm the book-smart one while David hated academics but loved working with his hands and with people. He ended up flunking out of college, much to Mom's chagrin. Meanwhile, it's taken me two decades to crawl out from under a boulder of stupidly self-inflicted debt; David, by contrast, has risen high in the ranks of his PR firm, where he works at the manager level as part of a creative team that hires actors and makes public-service videos (fire safety, etc.), complete with animated graphics, sound effects, voiceover narration, actual acting, etc. David is very good at what he does, and what he does requires equal amounts of brainpower and manual ability. He's arguably the most financially successful of the three brothers, and he got to where he is without native book smarts or test-taking ability. So are standardized tests good predictors of life-success? Politely put, I have my doubts. They may be good predictors of who will succeed in academe, which is its own often self-justifying bubble. A better predictor of overall life-success might be the quality called grit, a fusion of passion and perseverance, studied in some detail by Asian-American Angela Duckworth, who has written a book on the subject and has done TED Talks. So the SAT might have something to say about your smarts, but it has little to say about your character, which is what really carries you forward in life.