Sentence completion questions will present you with a statement that contains either one or two blanks. You will then be asked to pick out, from five choices, the word (or words) that, when put into the blank, will best complete the meaning of the sentence as a whole. In some instances only one word will be missing; in other instances, two words will be missing.
Sentence completion questions test two main attributes:
- the strength of your vocabulary
- your general verbal ability, especially your ability to understand the logic of sentences
To improve your vocabulary, you should read as widely as you can between now and the time of the test, looking up words you do not recognize. To improve your general verbal ability, you should
practice, using practice PSAT and SAT sentence completion questions. If you do both these things, you will substantially improve your score on the PSAT.
There are four main strategies for dealing with all types of sentence completion questions:
- Read the sentence for its overall meaning and internal logic, then quickly look over the choices--many times, this strategy alone will point you toward the answer, since your common sense may tell you that two or three of the choices (or four, if you are lucky) do not fit at all.
- Eliminate as many of the obvious wrong choices as you can.
- Look at key words that may point you to the meaning, words that introduce the sentence or link its parts together. OFten these words will tell you whether the two parts of the sentence have a similar meaning or an opposite meaning. For example, as, since, because, therefore, and similarly link two sentence parts with similar meangins. Yet, but, however,and on the contrary link two parts of sentences that have opposite meanings.
