Like text completion questions, your main strategy for sentence equivalence questions should be to guess the blank before looking at the choices. Read the sentence first, come up with your own filler word, and then compare your guess to the answer choices.
Because there are two correct answers, it helps to group the choices into synonym pairs (words with similar meanings). Most problems contain two to three synonym pairs. If you can identify three pairs, the question becomes much easier: even before you use the sentence, you’ve narrowed the choices to three possible pairs (a 1/3 chance). By contrast, if you randomly picked two out of the six words, your chances would be only 1/30.
Let’s walk through an example. Read the entire sentence, imagine a filler word, and then group the synonym pairs for the problem below.
The end of the election cycle had become so __________ that one did not need to listen to the final debate for more than a minute before hearing another sarcastic insult or scathing remark.
First, take a moment to imagine a filler word.
What did you come up with?
Your filler word should be something like “combative” or “quarrelsome” because the debaters are insulting each other.
Now, match the synonym pairs in the set of words below.
The six choices are best grouped into the three synonym pairs below. We’ve added words with similar meanings in parentheses in case you haven’t learned their definitions yet.
The synonym pair that most closely matches “combative” or “quarrelsome” is polemical/hostile. If you didn’t already know what polemical meant, that’s okay. This is exactly why guessing a filler word first is so useful: it helps you choose the right pair even when one word is unfamiliar.
That said, keep building your vocabulary so you’re not caught off guard by too many esoteric words on test day.