SAT Prep of the Day 3

Word of the Day:
TANTAMOUNT --- equivalent
"Refusing to take your finals is tantamount to giving up."

Question of the Day:
Today's question is from the Critical Reading Section... Choose the set of words that, when put into the sentence, best fits the meaning of the entire sentence...

The new faculty member was a world-renowned scholar who, unfortunately, considered teaching undergraduates ------- him; he rarely ------- to speak to students who were not taking advanced post-graduate courses.

a) within . . presumed
b) above . . needed
c) beneath . . deigned
d) beyond . . neglected
e) like . . prepared

So whenever you start questions of this sort, you want to first try to figure out what kind of word will go in the blanks. Will it be a positive word? A negative word? To determine this you want to look for keywords within a sentence. Words like but, therefore, however, because, etc. suggest a shift in the sentence and these will be very important to your understanding of it. In this particular sentence, the 'unfortunately' signals a shift in tone. This professor who is smart felt negatively about teaching undergraduates and thus you can assume that he did not speak to these students as much as he should have.

The general strategy for these questions is to start my filling the sentences in with words from your own mind so then you can look for similar words in the answer choices. Now there may be times when you don't know what the words in the answer choices mean (even I am not sure what deigned means). But that doesn't mean you can't get the answer right! Look through and use process of elimination!

We know that the professor felt negatively about the teaching so A and E can be eliminated. We can also assume because he doesn't like teaching them that he is likely to neglect the students; not rarely neglect them. So D is out too. Now we have it down to B and C. If you have no clue what deigned means, all we have to look at is the first word. Does it make sense that the teaching would be 'above him' or 'beneath him'? Because he is a world-renowned scholar and because we know he feels negatively about it, the right answer must be that he feels the teaching is beneath him. Answer C is the right answer!