Sentence equivalence
Like text completion questions, your main strategy for sentence equivalence questions should be to guess the blank before looking at the choices. After you’ve read the sentence and made your own guesses for the blanks, compare your filler word to the choices.
Since there will be two correct answers, it’s a good idea to group the synonyms by similar meanings. There are usually two to three synonym pairs in a problem. If you can group three pairs your job becomes much easier, since you’ll have a 1/3 chance of choosing the correct pair even without reading the sentence. 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 synonyms 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, try matching the synonym pairs in this set of words below.
- authoritarian
- boring
- dictatorial
- hostile
- monotonous
- polemical
The six choices are best grouped into the three synonym pairs below. We’ve added words with similar meanings in parenthesis in case you didn’t learn their definitions yet!
- boring, monotonous
- authoritarian (domineering), dictatorial
- polemical (critical), hostile
The synonym pair that most closest matches “combative” or “quarrelsome” is polemical/hostile. If you didn’t previously know what polemical meant, don’t worry! Guessing a filler word with a similar meaning is a tactic that helps you answer these questions even without knowing all the meanings. That said, do your best to consistently study vocabulary words so you aren’t surprised by too many esoteric words on test day!