Sentence Completions

Link of the Day: 

Tasty Research is a PhD student's blog. It contains links to various interesting and sometimes rather random studies. Although the author has clearly stopped updating, the links are still good and the studies are intriguing.

3/23 Sentence Completions

Choose the word or set of words that, when inserted in the sentence, best fits the meaning of the sentence as a whole. 

First, read the sentence for clues and make a prediction about what word will go in the blank. Then look at the answer choices for one that matches your prediction.

The research is so ------ that it leaves no part of the issue unexplained.

What kind of research leaves no part of the issue unexplained? Thorough, complete, exhaustive, far-reaching could work in this sentence. Compare these words to your answer choices:



A) comprehensive

B) rewarding

C) sporadic

D) economical

E) problematical


Problematical research might or might not explain every part of an issue, but it does so poorly. Economical research is conducted on a shoestring budget, and those do not usually bode well for completeness in investigation. Sporadic research is conducted in fits and starts; it would be extremely hard to complete an on-and-off research study with any degree of confidence in the results. Rewarding research makes the researchers feel proud of themselves or nets them some kind of recognition, but the reward is not always tied to the thoroughness of the actual research. Comprehensive research, on the other hand, would cover every aspect of the question being investigated and would complete this sentence perfectly.

The answer is A.


On sat.collegeboard.org, 80% of responses were correct.


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