Word choice (or vocabulary in context) questions on the CLT have a way of making a student feel at a loss. What do I do if I simply don’t know the words given? In response to this very real and widespread cry of frustration, we want to offer some help.
This should be said first: it makes no sense to pretend this difficulty either doesn’t exist or can easily be overcome. It does, and it can’t–not easily, at least. Depending on the strength of a student’s vocabulary, there are probably somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 unfamiliar words in potential CLT passages. That is far more than you can realistically study and memorize, even if it were easy to identify precisely the words to study (it isn’t). So we can dispense with the idea that, as part of your CLT exam preparation, you will make a giant stack of flashcards stretching from floor to ceiling and spend hours of each day churning through it. With this in mind, how should you proceed?
A Word of Preface: Should I Attempt Word Choice Questions?
First, let’s consider your overall strategy and how you determine which questions to spend the most time on. You will likely face four pure word choice questions on test day. If you were to guess randomly on all four, the odds suggest that you would get one correct. If you were to get every other question on the Grammar & Writing section correct while guessing randomly on the word choice questions, therefore, your score would be 37/40. Would you be happy with that score? We will assume that over 99% of students reading this would say yes. Granted, it is very hard to answer the other 36 non-word choice questions correctly, but this thought exercise reveals two principles:
If you are tight on time, guess quickly on the word choice questions. (Do not leave them blank. Never leave a CLT question blank!)
If you have the time, address word choice questions using the strategies below, but skip them the first time through and address them last, after you complete every other question.
Assuming you plan to give time and attention to the word choice questions on test day. How should you do so? Here are some tools for that project.
Approach Question
Should you leave the sentence below as it is or opt for one of the three alternatives listed in the answer choices?
If no one can collaborate Beth’s story of her whereabouts the night of the crime, then she will have to find another alibi.
A. NO CHANGE
B. conspire
C. corroborate
D. consolidate
Some of the most challenging Word Choice questions occur when two words sound similar. Do you know the difference between “collaborate” and “corroborate”? The first of the two may sound more familiar; does it sound right to say “collaborate Beth’s story”? “Collaborate” means “work together,” as in a group project. It is what is known as an intransitive verb, meaning it does not take a direct object. You cannot “collaborate” something; you simply collaborate. So we can rule out answer choice A.
Before addressing the other close-sounding word, let’s consider the other choices. To “consolidate” is to make something stronger or combine several things together into a whole. That sounds really close in that Beth does need to have a strong story so she won’t have to find another alibi. But the subject is “no one,” which would sound odd with “consolidate”, and in any case a story is not the sort of thing you might consolidate. (Although you might consolidate evidence to make the story stronger.) Beth’s story doesn’t really need strengthening; it needs proof.
What about “conspire”? Here the logic of the sentence helps us. Beth will have to find another alibi if there is not proof or confirmation of her story. We don’t want anyone to “conspire” in this context; that would only make Beth sound more guilty! In any case, to “conspire a story” doesn’t sound right; “conspire” is another intransitive verb.
That leaves corroborate. Notice that, even if you don’t know that this word means to confirm or back up with evidence, you can eliminate the three (presumably more familiar) words by using the context. And context is what Word Choice questions are all about! (Well, that and using your vocabulary.) So “corroborate” conveys exactly what Beth’s story needs: confirmation. The answer is C.
Part 1: General Strategy
1. Read the surrounding context. The DIRECT method already instructs you to always read the entire sentence in which the underlined portion is found. In many cases, this will be sufficient context to address the question, but there are certainly times where it is necessary to look further back in the passage in order to pick up all the necessary clues.
2. Find the clues. What clues does the context hold concerning which word will work best? These clues could be any part of speech, but look especially for words of emphasis, particularly contrast. You have no better friend on the CLT than words like “but”, “however”, and “although”.
Consider the following example: *My sister crept into my room so _______ that I had no idea she was there until she spoke.* What are the clues to the word we should fill in the blank? Take a moment to list them all, then check out the spoiler below.
(spoiler)
crept
so
I had no idea she was there
All of these words and phrases work together to paint a mental picture of the sister’s action. Do you have that picture in your mind? If so, now do this:
3. Predict the word you’re looking for. If your mental picture of the sister was clear and accurate, you would probably suggest a word like “quietly”. (The fancier among us might go with stealthily or furtively.) Whatever you chose, as long as it was in this realm of meaning, it should do the trick. Note also that the word should be an adverb, a word with an “-ly” ending, because it modifies “crept” and follows “so”.
But wait a minute, you might be saying: the CLT doesn’t give us a “_____” blank on the test. It gives us a word and we have to either accept that word or choose one of three replacements. True! But this strategy still works; you simply need to pretend the original word is not there to apply it. Don’t consider the answer choices until you’ve done so, and you will have set yourself up much better to grasp which of the choices makes the most sense.
4. Make your choice and plug it back into the sentence. Read the entire sentence with your chosen word in place and ask yourself whether it sounds as apt as you hoped when choosing it. If something sounds inappropriate or odd to you, and you feel you have the time to continue working on the question, revisit the answer choices and see if you eliminated one of the other choices too quickly.
Try this question now:
Should you leave the sentence below as it is or opt for one of the three alternatives listed in the answer choices?
The balsa model boat was so light that it only took a gentle wind to blow it across the lake.
A. NO CHANGE
B. furious
C. contrary
D. howling
(spoiler)
As always with word choice questions, context is vital. You can probably imagine a “furious” or “howling” wind, as both of those adjectives can be appropriate to describe a wind. But they don’t describe the right type of wind in this case. The context tells us that it shouldn’t take much to blow the boat across the lake. So both “furious” and “howling” are far too strong, not to mention so synonymous that you could eliminate them both anyway.
What about “contrary”? It may seem an odd word to use with “wind”. A “contrary wind” is one blowing against the direction someone wants it to blow (imagine a sailor easily using the term). That doesn’t fit here, and “gentle” surely does. The answer is NO CHANGE.
Part 2: Decoding Vocabulary
Step 4 in the method above assumes you understand what the four answer choices mean; as already noted, that might not be the case. How can you help yourself make educated guesses when at least one of the four choices is unfamiliar to you? Here are some tools for decoding unfamiliar words.
1. Return to your roots. You might not have seen the word before, but have you seen part of it? If you have taken Latin, you have a significant leg up in identifying the meaning of a prefix, suffix, or main stem of a word. Let’s consider the challenging word circumspect. Many, if not most, students will be unfamiliar with this word, or at least uncertain about its definition. If you have taken Latin, however, you are likely aware that circum means “around” and that spect has to do with “looking”. (You don’t even need Latin; think of how a _circum_ference goes around a circle and how _spect_acles are for seeing.) With these tools at your disposal, you can at the very least suppose that circumspect has something to do with “looking around.” Its meaning, more precisely, is “cautious” or “prudent”, but those ideas are not a significant distance away from the idea of someone who, as the proverb says, “looks before he leaps.”
2. Make room for Romance. We mean Romance languages here (corny, we know). If you haven’t taken Latin, there’s an excellent chance you’ve taken either French or Spanish. If so, you probably know that both of those languages come from Latin, so you can access the language at the root of many English words by thinking about your world language study. If you’ve taken Spanish (or even if you haven’t), you may be familiar with the phrase “Feliz Navidad” (Merry Christmas). So what if you see the word felicitous on the CLT? That first part looks a lot like the word for “merry” or “happy” in Spanish. At the least, you could guess (correctly) that the word has a positive connotation. It doesn’t mean “happy” in the sense of an emotion but rather in the sense of a “happy occurrence”: something that appears random but that benefits those to whom it happens.
What about French? One of the first phrases you may have learned is “Je parle francais” (“I speak French”). If that word “parle” (infinitive parler) means “speak”, then what do you think parlance might mean in English? Something to do with speaking, for sure. “Parlance” refers to a manner or mode of speech. Someone might use the phrase “in common parlance” to talk how people usually speak. Note how, whether we use Spanish or French, we have tools to, at minimum, make our guesses on Word Choice questions more likely to be correct!
3. Add a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” You might not know exactly what a word means but nevertheless have some sense of whether its connotation is positive or negative. Consider the word refulgent. It kind of rolls off the tongue and has a part that sounds like a “full” in the middle. Indeed, the word turns out to mean “radiant”. By contrast, how about pestilence? Even if you don’t know that word refers to a terrible contagious disease, you probably have a sense from “pest” that it can’t be good! Admittedly, the sound of a word can differ somewhat based on the “ear” of the hearer (maybe you didn’t think “refulgent” sounded amazingly positive), but the “thumbs up/thumbs down” can nevertheless be helpful in narrowing down the answer choices.
4. Words aren’t usually “only children.” Most hard vocabulary words have “siblings” or cousins” that are simply different parts of speech. A challenging noun may have a similar word that is a verb or an adjective. An unfamiliar word might point to a similar word that feels more familiar in its adjective or adverb form. Let’s start with the word tutelage; you might not know the word exactly, but doesn’t it sound a bit like “tutor”? Indeed, it’s related; being under someone’s “tutelage” means that person is teaching you. Or take a stranger word like opacity. What word have you heard, perhaps in science class, that has the same first three letters? Did you think of the word “opaque”? It turns out that opacity is simply the noun form of opaque. It’s harder to recognize because it changes the q to a c, but not impossible to see if you look carefully.
Try this question now:
Should you leave the sentence below as it is or opt for one of the three alternatives listed in the answer choices?
Standing at the edge of the innocuous cliff, we cautiously peered over the side.
A. NO CHANGE
B. belligerent
C. benevolent
D. precipitous
(spoiler)
How many of the four possible words here can you define? If you know even two of the four, you’re doing well. Let’s use our proven strategy for Word Choice questions and then try to decode the words at play.
First, we use the context to plug in our own idea. If those standing at the cliff peered over “cautiously”, it must be a high, steep cliff. Something “high” or “steep” is what we’re looking for in our answer. We can also anticipate a word that properly conveys the daunting sense of fear likely present.
With these things in mind, you can rule out “benevolent” if you recognize that the root “ben-” means “good”. “Benevolent” means “having positive or kind intentions.” Not a good fit here.
By contrast, you might notice the prefix “belli-” in the word “belligerent”. This has to do with war, and indeed “belligerent” means “warlike”. This may be a little tougher to eliminate because something belligerent might evoke fear, but it’s hard to speak of a cliff as “warlike”. That choice can be crossed out.
We are left with “innocuous” and “precipitous”. There are not any obvious roots to “innocuous” (though it does come from Latin), but what about “precipitous”? Does it make you think of a similar word? How about precipitation? What does precipitation do? It falls from the sky. That idea certainly seems to fit with what those at the cliff might be fearing. You could at least make an education that “precipitation” works, and indeed it does, because “innocuous” means “harmless” so we can eliminate that choice. The answer is D because “precipitous” means “dangerously high or steep”.
Part 3: Two More Tools
1. Consider shades of meaning. Sometimes a pair of words can mean similar things but have a small but significant difference in their exact meaning. Consider these sentences:
-Lee made a self-denigrating joke.
-Lee made a self-deprecating joke.
These are challenging vocabulary words, but if you’ve heard these words before, you might notice a small difference. A “self-deprecating” expression puts the narrator down but in a lighthearted, aw-shucks, charmingly humble way. A “self-denigrating” joke would have a harder, meaner edge; in that sentence, Lee is not being kind to himself at all, and there’s nothing lighthearted about it. Sometimes answer choices can differ in these more nuanced ways; you might be able to narrow down the answers to two somewhat similar ideas but than have to dig deeper to identify the difference between those remaining choices.
2. Look out for differences in style. Consider these two ways to say essentially the same thing:
-Alina makes her coffee extra strong to perk her up.
-Alina makes her coffee more potent than usual to keep her alert.
Both of these sentences tell the same story: Alina needs her strong coffee! But the first sentence is less formal and the second sentence more formal. Although CLT passages will, in general, tend toward the more formal sides, there are degrees of difference in that formality that are worth noticing as you seek to choose the correct word or phrase. On occasion, a passage will come from a speech rather than a written work; the language in speeches is often less formal, so be sure to note the nature of the work being excerpted to understand what sort of formal or informal language you might expect from this author.
Try this question now:
Should you leave the sentence below as it is or opt for one of the three alternatives listed in the answer choices?
The haughty celebrity glared at us dismissively and then looked away.
A. NO CHANGE
B. gazed
C. glowered
D. glanced
(spoiler)
This question is about shades of meaning; it’s also about connotation: the “feeling” suggested by a word or phrase. There is a real difference in the duration of a look between, say, a “glancing” and “gazing”; the former is quick, but the latter lingers. Meanwhile, some of the answer choices (“gazed”, “glanced”) are neutral in the feeling they convey, while “glared” and “glowered” both suggest negative emotions behind the look in the eyes.
So, to answer this question, we peer into the context and ask ourselves how a “haughty celebrity” (stereotypically) might look at ordinary people. Such a celebrity would likely do so “dismissively”. That’s a negative idea, and “glowered” and “glared” carry negative meaning, but both of these words suggest anger or resentment. This celebrity may be arrogant and dismissive, but there’s no hint that s/he is angry. Better to choose a word that her look is fleeting, moving on quickly to other things. That eliminates “gazed”, as a “gaze” usually lasts a while. “Glanced” fits best, so the answer is D.
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