Nineteen of the sixty-seven questions in the Critical Reading portion of any SAT are sentence completions. These are questions that require you to use your understanding of sentence logic and vocabulary to choose the correct word (or pair of words) to fill in the blank (or blanks) in sentences. In the following paragraphs, we’re going to discuss how to work through a sentence completion question, using an example from the College Board’s website. Their site provides an explanation for the answer, but they don’t explain in depth how to arrive at it. That’s what we’re going to do here.
Because King Philip’s desire to make Spain the dominant power in sixteenth-century Europe ran counter to Queen Elizabeth’s insistence on autonomy for England, ——- was ——-.
(A) reconciliation . . assured
(B) warfare . . avoidable
(C) ruination . . impossible
(D) conflict . . inevitable
(E) diplomacy . . simple
To work through a sentence completion like this one, start by reading the sentence, focusing on logical relationships. In this case, the part of the sentence before the comma tells us that King Philip’s and Queen Elizabeth’s desires are in conflict with one another. The key words “counter to” highlight the idea that Spain being dominant and England being autonomous (self-governing) cannot happen at the same time. The words in the blanks must signify that there is a conflict. Their meanings depend upon one another, and they must either be a pair that means “peaceful coexistence” was “impossible,” or “fighting” was “unavoidable.” Now, in order to find the correct word pair among the answer choices, try plugging each one into the sentence to see which pair has the correct type of logical relationship that fits in the sentence.
Choice A is incorrect: there was a conflict, so reconciliation was not assured.
Choice B is incorrect: the conflict was a big one between nations – warfare may have been unavoidable.
Choice C is not correct; the conflict between these two nations did not make ruination impossible.
Choice D is the only answer so far that makes sense: in the situation the sentence describes, conflict was definitely inevitable. That sounds like the correct answer. But, so that we can be certain, we’ll look at choice E, “diplomacy” and “simple.” Because the logic of the sentence tells us that diplomacy was not simple, that can’t possibly be the answer. Having eliminated all of the other choices, we can be pretty sure that the correct answer is choice D, “conflict” and “inevitable.” Just to make certain, we’ll re-read the sentence with our word choices in the blanks:
“Because King Philip’s desire to make Spain the dominant power in sixteenth-century Europe ran counter to Queen Elizabeth’s insistence on autonomy for England, conflict was inevitable.” That sentence is logically consistent, so choice D is our answer.
Sentence completion questions like the one we worked through above are really four-step problems. This may sound like a lot of work, but breaking down the harder questions into four steps actually makes more difficult ones more solvable. Let’s take a look at the four steps we used to answer that sentence completion problem.
Step one: figure out what the sentence is trying to say. Step two: infer what should be in the blank (or blanks) by using words from your own head that fit with the sentence’s logic. Step three: look at the answer choices, searching for words that match up with your inferences. Step four: re-read the sentence with your answer choice in place of the blank (or blanks), making sure the completed sentence makes sense. Particularly for the questions that contain more difficult logic and vocabulary, it’s important to break the work down into these four steps in order to choose the best possible answer.
Remember, you’ve been taking an SAT prep course and learning a lot of new vocabulary. You may be surprised at how much you know. If a sentence completion seems difficult, make sure you work through it one step at a time. Your objective is to get as many points as possible on the SAT. Getting as many correct answers to sentence completions as possible will help you toward that objective.
