Читать книгу SAT For Dummies - Woods Geraldine, Geraldine Woods, Ron Woldoff - Страница 47

Line-number questions aren’t always first, but they are the easiest to answer, making these the best and fastest segue to your understanding of the passage as a whole.

This excerpt is from the science passage The Dancing Mouse: A Study in Animal Behavior, by Robert M. Yerkes.

In Line 4, the best definition of “manifest” is

Cover the answer choices! What do you think the best definition of “manifest” is as it’s used in the passage, based on what the “weakness” doesn’t do? How about “appear”? Now cross off wrong answers:

(A) emphasize

(B) prove

(C) discover

(D) show

How did you do? Did you cross off Choices (A), (B), and (C)? They’re so far out that it has to be Choice (D). Here’s the logic:

(A)	emphasize	Cross this off: “Emphasize” refers to something already present, while “appear” refers to something new.
(B)	prove	Cross this off: “Prove” also refers to something already present, not something new like “appear.”
(C)	discover	Cross this off: “Discover” refers to actively finding something, while “appear” refers to being found.
(D)	show	Place a dot: “Show” could refer to actively finding something, but it also could refer to being found, like “appear.”

Vocabulary-in-context questions like this one do have a trap. Many of these questions ask for the definition of a word you probably already know. But — the passage may use the word in an odd or unusual way, and the answer choices are usually known definitions of the word. For example, the word deck may be “a surface of a ship,” “a wooden structure outside a house,” “a pack of cards,” or “to decorate.” In the Christmas carol “Deck the Halls,” deck matches the last meaning, but outside the song, who uses that meaning? Don’t settle for a definition that you recognize: Make sure it matches the context of the sentence.