coll. - SAT Power Vocab: A Complete Guide to Vocabulary Skills and Strategies for the SAT

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Reading and Writing Workout for the SAT

Word Smart

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If youre reading this book, chances are you are preparing to take a major standardized test such as the SAT. Or perhaps you have already taken the SAT and will be taking it again in hopes of achieving a higher score. You may have heard that the SAT no longer tests vocabulary, but this is not entirely accurate. It is true that the SAT does not test as much vocabulary as it once did, but here at The Princeton Review we know that students with a strong vocabulary tend to get better scores. Why?

The College Boards SAT underwent a major change in March 2016. Prior to 2016, there were many questions (called Sentence Completions) that explicitly tested difficult vocabulary words. And if you go back further in time to when your parents took the test, for example, there were even more vocabulary-based questions, such as word analogies. In March 2016, Sentence Completions were removed from the SAT, and the entire Verbal portion of the exam was said to test only reading and grammar skills.

The dirty little secret about the SAT, however, is that you still need a strong knowledge of vocabulary in order to score well. Difficult words still appear in many Reading passages, questions, and answer choices, and if you dont know these words, you will probably struggle. The SAT contains at least 1015 words that the average student may not knowwhich could be the difference between answering a question correctly and getting stuck.

At The Princeton Review, we know the SAT like the backs of our hands. We know what words you are likely to see on the SAT and which words you will not. More importantly, we know some effective strategies for learning unfamiliar vocabulary that do not require long hours spent memorizing endless lists of difficult words.

You may be thinking, There is more to life than a score on a standardized test. Yes, we agree. Although we eat, sleep, and breathe bubble sheets and #2 pencils, we do occasionally venture into the real world. And, yes, you guessed it: Vocabulary is useful there, too.

The English language is impressive in its variety. Unabridged dictionaries can contain as many as 600,000 words, but if you count the myriad of technical words found in disciplines such as science, medicine, engineering, and law, there are likely about one million English words. None of us can learn all of thesenor do we need tobut the more words you know, the more you will understand the world around you. When a news anchor says that a bill has bipartisan support in Congress, you will be a more engaged citizen if you know what bipartisan means. (It means that both political parties support the legislation.)

A complaint we often hear from students is that the English language is too complex. For instance, why are there at least seven synonyms for friendly (affable, amiable, amicable, amenable, cordial, genial, solicitous, and so on) when we could all just say friendly? For the same reason there are there at least a million songs available to download when you could just listen to the same Beyonc song all day. Variety is the spice of life!

Convinced yet? Well, what if we told you that having a stronger vocabulary can actually make you smarter? How can we make such a bold claim?

Psychology researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley conducted an important study on preschoolers nearly 30 years ago. The study was simple: They counted the number of words that the preschoolers heard in their everyday lives from parents, siblings, playmates, television, and so on. They then tracked these children throughout the rest of their childhoods and measured how well they performed in school and, later, whether these children went to college, where they went to college, and what careers they pursued.