I thought that the first idea of the sentence carried a negative connotation and the “but” would turn the second idea into a positive one and picked C. What went wrong with my thinking here?
My guesses for the two blanks were “impenetrable” and “accurate” due to the contrast provided by the word “yet” in the second idea. However, the answer choices completely threw me off and thought that the only words carrying a positive connotation for the second blank were “reliable” and “useful”. Moreover, for the first blank, the only choice close to my guess was “arbitrary”. I was completely confused and guessed an answer because I couldn’t gather enough evidence for any of the answer choices. How can I improve my performance on such questions?
For #3, it’s a shift from bad to worse. Like if I said, “I thought Pizza Hut was bad, but then I tried Domino’s, which was even worse”. There isn’t really a “tell” here - I have to look at the choices since I might predict “maturity”. Also, “decisiveness” isn’t a good contrast with young and impressionable, so if this was a normal contrast, that wouldn’t work - we would need something like “maturity”.
I really don’t like #5, since there isn’t really any way to find evidence for the answers - I have to trial and error this one - nothing useful lets me predict other than blank i is negative and blank ii is positive. Again, I don’t really recommend heavy Big Book analysis, since I think this question doesn’t behave quite like the current test.
For 3, I also came up with a guess matching “maturity” I think it was “precociousness” or something along those lines but was not able to figure out the “bad to worse” shift. Any way to get better at this?
