Sentence Completions

Link of the Day

Once again we return to history.com's "This Day in History." Today in 1788 New Hampshire became the 9th state to ratify the U.S. constitution (thus making it official). The Constitution was written to address some of the inadequacies of the Articles of Confederation. Initially many of the states were hesitant to ratify the Constitution because it failed to protect basic rights such as the freedom of speech (this was addressed later in the first 10 amendments to the Constitution known as the Bill of Rights). You can learn more about the history of the ratification of the U.S. Constitution here.

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.

Always remember to make a prediction before you look at the answers. Four of the five answers are wrong and looking at the answers first tends to prejudice you towards a specific choice. All the information you need to predict a word and then select the correct answer is in the sentence itself.

Laboratories have been warned that provisions for animal protection that in the past were merely _______ will now be mandatory;________ of this policy will lose their federal research grants.

With two blank sentence completions you should always start by predicting the easier blank and eliminating. In this sentence completion, the first blank is quite easy to predict. You know that the "provisions for animal protection in the past that were merely_________ will now be mandatory."If the provisions will now be "mandatory", then in the past they were probably "optional" or only "suggested" but not required. Now, look at the answer choices and eliminate the ones that do not match your prediction.

(A) comprehensive . . . adversaries
(B) nominal . . .  advocates
(C) disregarded . . . proponents
(D) recommended . . . violators
(E) compulsory . . . resisters

Remember that the Knowsys method for sentence completions is designed to save you time and help you to avoid errors. In this case, you can eliminate 4 of the answers because they don't match your prediction. Only (D) matches your prediction so that must be the correct choice. If you still had 2 or more choices left, you would then simply make a prediction for the remaining blank and chooses the answer that matched your predictions for both blanks. In this case however, you only had to predict one blank and that saves you time.

The correct answer is (D).


Vocab tested in this SC:

comprehensive: broadly or completely covering
adversaries: opponents or rivals
nominal: of resembling, relating to, or consisting of a name or names
advocates: a person who argues the case of another, such as lawyer in a court
disregarded: ignored, neglected
proponents: one who supports something; an advocate
recommended: suggested, represented favourably
violators: one who violates (to break, disregard, disagree, or not act according to)
compulsory: required; obligatory; mandatory
resisters: a person who resists (to attempt to counter the actions or effects of) going along with others in a common course of action.

On sat.collegeboard.org 73% of the responses were correct

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