Sentence Completions

Link of the Day

Today's SAT Question of the Day mentions the "Red Tail Angels". The Tuskegee Airmen, or the "Red Tail Angels" as they came to be known, were a group of African American pilots who fought during WWII.  You can learn more about them here or, if you are more visually inclined, you can view an excellent documentary here. The "Red Tail Angels" have the potential to make a great "Excellent Example" in your SAT essay.

Critical Reading 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. 

Remember that the answer choices on most SAT questions are there to confuse you. Out of the five listed, four of them are wrong! Use the Knowsys Method: look at the sentence, make a prediction without reading the answer choices, and then compare the answer choices to your prediction to find the one that matches most closely.

A group of Black American fighter pilots known as the Red Tail Angels has the ------- of never having lost any of the bombers it escorted on missions over Europe in the Second World War.

The first step for this question is to read it carefully and make a prediction based on the information in the sentence. We can be fairly certain that the word we are looking for is a positive word. However, it's best if we can predict a specific word. Even though the right answer probably won't be exactly the word we predicted, it will be easier to eliminate wrong answers with a specific word prediction. Here we can see that a word like honor or prestige would fit the blank well. Once we have predicted a word, we look at the answer choices below and choose the word that matches our prediction.

(A)        onus

(B)        distinction

(C)        imperative

(D)        potential

(E)        assignment

We can immediately eliminate Assignment and Imperative because they are not positively charged words. In this case Potential is also not a positive word. Even if you are not sure what Onus means, if you know that Distinction means honor or prestige and, therefore, fits our prediction, you can still get to the correct answer, which is (B).

Words Tested in this SC

Onus: A legal obligation

Distinction: A distinguishing factor, attribute, or characteristic

Imperative: Essential

Potential: Existing in possibility, not in actuality

Assignment: A position or task to which someone is assigned

On sat.collegeboard.com 74% of the responses were correct.

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