Sentence Completion

[ulty]

What is a sentence completion?

Introduction

Here's an example:

We decided to cancel the picnic since the weather was ------.

Difficult one, huh? Can you figure out which word would best fit in the blank? If you are like most people, you would say something like bad or some other word with a negative meaning since we are canceling a picnic because of some type of weather. Of course, you will probably never see such an easy question on the test, but the idea is the same.


Let's look at some answer choices you might have for the example that we saw above:

(A) funny
(B) late
(C) bad
(D) good
(E) hot

Again, if you are like 99 44/100% of all the other people doing this exercise, you would choose bad since we already figured out that bad weather would be a good reason to cancel a picnic.

Don't look at the answer choices!

It is good practice not to look at the answer choices when you are doing sentence corrections. It is very easy to be tricked by the answer choices when you are doing the sentence completions and GRE professionals can anticipate the answer choices before they even look at the answer choices.


It is kind of hard to come up with an example that will prove to you that it is important not to look at the answer choices, but I have tried. So, please understand that I am trying to teach you something and try to bear with me if you think this example is too easy.


First, look at these answer choices:

(A) dangerous
(B) vicious
(C) edible
(D) strong
(E) docile

My point here is that you now have some sort of idea of what the following sentence might mean. Now, before you read the question stem, I want you to try to notice how your preconceptions of the answer choices interfere with your ability to understand the sentence. On final point, please keep in mind that I have used very simple language so that we can focus on the structure of the questions, not on the vocab.


Now, read the sentence:

The ferocious tiger that we encountered while we were lost in the jungle was surprisingly ------ .

Did you feel that you already had the idea that the ferocious tiger would be dangerous or vicious? If you can imagine this question with harder vocabulary and more complex sentence structure, then you might be able to understand how you might be easily tricked if the sentence is hard to understand. Anyway, the best answer here is docile, which means easily controlled, because the word surprisingly tells us that the adjective to describe the tiger is unexpected. In this case, it would be a surprise to find out that the tiger was docile.


Let's do some practice.

[Tan]

keep posting some intresting ,informative tutorials.