What the item actually tests
The stem is always Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase? Two words in that stem do all the work. Logical means the choice must agree with a relationship the passage has already established. Precise means that when two choices both point the right way, the one that matches the passage's own degree of claim wins.
The item is not a vocabulary quiz. Every one of the four choices is a word a strong reader knows. What separates them is whether the passage licenses them.
The routine. (1) Read to the end of the passage before touching the blank. (2) Underline the words that constrain the blank — the contrast signal, the colon, the example, the pronoun that points back. (3) Write your own word in the margin. Any word. A phrase is fine. (4) Substitute each choice into the whole sentence and reject on direction, strength, or collocation.
Bước 3 là bước hay bị bỏ nhất và cũng là bước quyết định. Nếu nhìn bốn phương án trước khi tự nghĩ ra từ, đầu bạn sẽ đi tìm lý do để bênh từng phương án, và phương án nào cũng bênh được — đó chính là cách đề đánh lừa. Tự viết ra một từ trước rồi mới mở phương án, bạn chỉ còn việc so khớp, và việc so khớp thì nhanh hơn việc tranh luận rất nhiều.
Lichens absorb water and minerals directly from the air rather than from soil, so they take in whatever the atmosphere carries. Because sulfur dioxide harms the algal partner inside a lichen well before any damage shows in the surrounding trees, a woodland's lichen cover thins while everything else still looks healthy. Surveyors value the organism precisely because it is : lichen cover responds to a change in air quality that monitoring stations a few kilometres away may not record for another season.
- robust
- sensitive
- deliberate
- speculative
Step 1: the passage says lichens react to pollution earlier than instruments do. Step 2: the colon is the constraint — whatever fills the blank must be restated by the clause after it. Step 3: my own word is quick to react. Step 4: robust (A) is the opposite of quick to react; deliberate (C) attributes intention to an organism and matches nothing after the colon; speculative (D) would describe an idea, not a property of the lichen. Answer (B).
Step 1–2: find the claim, then find its anchor
The blank never floats free. Somewhere in the passage there is a phrase that pins it: a rather than, a not… but, a colon, a because, a list of examples, a pronoun. Locate that phrase first and the range of acceptable words collapses to almost nothing.
Excavators working at a Bronze Age settlement in the Carpathian basin found no defensive wall, no weapons cache, and no burned layer of the kind that marks an assault. What they did find was a sequence of houses rebuilt on exactly the same footprints for nearly three centuries. The excavation report treats this pattern as evidence that the settlement's abandonment was rather than sudden: families left over generations, taking their timber with them.
- violent
- disputed
- accidental
- gradual
The anchor is rather than sudden, and it does the whole job: the blank must mean the opposite of sudden. Violent (A) is contradicted by the absence of weapons and burning; accidental (C) and disputed (B) are not opposites of sudden at all. Answer (D).
When conservators removed a nineteenth-century varnish from a seventeenth-century still life, the greens they expected to find beneath it were not there. The painter had used a pigment that darkens with age, so what now reads as a brown shadow behind the fruit was, when the panel left the studio, bright foliage. Catalogue descriptions written before the cleaning therefore the painting's original palette, praising a sombre picture that had never existed.
- misrepresented
- restored
- anticipated
- exaggerated
The anchor is the final clause: the catalogues described something that was never there. Restored (B) is what the conservators did, not what the catalogues did. Anticipated (C) would require the catalogues to have got it right in advance. Exaggerated (D) means overstating a real feature, but the sombre palette was not a real feature to overstate. Answer (A).
Chọn theo chủ đề. Đoạn văn nói về bảo tồn tranh thì phương án “restored” nhìn rất hợp cảnh, và nhiều học sinh chọn nó chỉ vì nó thuộc cùng trường từ vựng. Chỗ trống không hỏi đoạn văn nói về cái gì, nó hỏi câu chứa chỗ trống khẳng định điều gì. Từ cùng chủ đề mà sai chủ ngữ hành động thì vẫn sai.
Step 3: predict before you look
A prediction does not have to be elegant. Something like “made it worse” is a perfectly good prediction, and it eliminates three choices in two seconds.
A colony of prairie dogs digs burrow systems that stay several degrees cooler than the surface and hold moisture through the dry season. Insects, snakes, and burrowing owls that could not survive on the exposed grassland move into the tunnels. Removing the prairie dogs, then, does not simply subtract one species from the grassland; it the habitat that a dozen others depend on.
- withdraws
- obscures
- dismantles
- tolerates
Prediction: takes apart. The sentence needs a verb strong enough to justify does not simply subtract one species. Obscures (B) and tolerates (D) are the wrong idea entirely. Withdraws (A) is the right idea but the wrong verb for the object: one withdraws support or an offer, not a habitat. Answer (C).
Step 4: read the whole sentence back
Three things sink a choice at this step, and they are worth naming separately.
Direction. The passage is moving toward praise and the choice moves toward blame, or the passage sets up a contrast and the choice continues the thought.
Strength. The passage says an estimate was rough; the choice says it was invented. Correct direction, wrong size.
Collocation. The choice would never take that object in English. Withdraw a habitat, answer a difficulty, commit an improvement — each is the right meaning attached to the wrong noun.
The first exoplanet surveys were biased toward giant planets in tight orbits, because those tug hardest on their stars and cross in front of them most often. As instruments improved, smaller and more distant worlds entered the catalogues, and the early impression that hot Jupiters were typical dissolved. The lesson is not that the early surveys were wrong but that their results were : they described the planets the method could see, not the planets that exist.
- fabricated
- partial
- irrelevant
- inconclusive
The lesson is not that the early surveys were wrong caps the strength of the answer, which kills fabricated (A) and irrelevant (C) immediately. Inconclusive (D) would mean the surveys reached no conclusion, but they did reach one; the trouble is that it covered only part of the field. Answer (B).
Ba trục loại phương án — chiều, độ mạnh, cách kết hợp — nên chạy theo đúng thứ tự đó. Chiều loại được nhiều nhất và nhanh nhất. Độ mạnh là chỗ đề gài các câu khó: hai phương án cùng chiều, một cái đúng cỡ, một cái quá tay. Cách kết hợp là chốt cuối, dành cho lúc còn đúng hai phương án nghe đều xuôi — lúc đó hãy đọc to nguyên cụm động từ cộng tân ngữ, không đọc mỗi từ trong chỗ trống.
Direction, strength, register
Register is the quiet fourth trap. Academic prose about instruments, cores, and archives does not personify. A word that would be natural about a person is often wrong about a rock.
Reviewers of the 1899 novel praised its dialogue and said almost nothing about its structure, which readers a century later find its most daring feature: the narrative doubles back on itself three times, and each return revises what the previous pass appeared to establish. Nineteenth-century reviewers had no vocabulary for a device that had not yet been named, so they it — not because they disliked it but because it was, for them, invisible.
- condemned
- defended
- refined
- overlooked
The dash clause forbids any word that implies an opinion, which removes condemned (A) and defended (B). Refined (C) would make the reviewers into practitioners. What is left is a word for failing to notice. Answer (D).
Đề rất hay đặt một mệnh đề phụ ở cuối câu chỉ để chặn hai phương án. Kiểu như “— not because they disliked it but because…”. Học sinh đọc lướt thường dừng lại ở chỗ trống rồi chọn luôn, chưa đọc tới mệnh đề chặn. Quy tắc cứng: đọc hết dấu chấm cuối cùng của đoạn rồi mới được chọn.
When two choices share a dictionary meaning
If two choices are near synonyms, at least one of them is wrong on precision, and the passage will always say which. Look for the sentence that states what the writer is not claiming.
A panel convened to review a proposed method for dating rock art examined the chemistry behind it and found no fault in the underlying reaction. Its objection was narrower. The dozen samples the method had been tested on all came from a single shelter with unusually stable humidity, and the panel could not tell whether the results would hold elsewhere. The report therefore the proposal's central claim: the technique was sound, but the evidence that it travelled was missing.
- endorsed
- dismissed
- qualified
- restated
Its objection was narrower sets the strength. Endorsed (A) ignores the objection; dismissed (B) ignores narrower and contradicts no fault in the underlying reaction. Restated (D) describes no change at all, but the report did change the claim's scope. The word for accepting a claim while limiting its reach is the answer. Answer (C).
Hai phương án gần nghĩa thì luôn có một câu trong đoạn đóng vai trọng tài. Thường là câu dạng “không phải X mà là Y”, “chỉ là”, “narrower”, “not that… but that…”. Tìm đúng câu đó trước, đừng tra từ điển trong đầu để so hai từ — đề không hỏi hai từ ấy khác nhau thế nào, đề hỏi đoạn văn cho phép từ nào.