Vocabulary as such is not tested on the SAT. Until a few years ago, the exam included antonym questions, which required you to pick a word whose meaning was the opposite of some other word. Those questions have been eliminated. So the most direct and obvious form of a vocabulary question on the SAT is no more.
That leaves indirect and hidden vocabulary questions—of which there are plenty ;
- Reading comprehension passages now include vocabulary-in-context questions. These focus on particular words in the passage and ask you to determine their meaning in the passage. Sometimes the words chosen are obviously “hard” words (latent, replete, and eminent, to name three real examples). More often, they are seemingly “easy” words that are tricky because they have so many possible meanings (camp, idea, and hard, for example). In both cases, the broader, more varied, and more accurate your vocabulary knowledge, the better your chances are of answering these questions quickly and correctly.
- The better your vocabulary knowledge, the easier you’ll find it to understand both the critical reading passages and the sentence completion items (which are, in effect, mini-passages, each one sentence long). Even an occasional math item is made a little more complicated by the use of a challenging vocabulary word.
The SAT is basically a test of “book learning.” It’s written and edited by bookish people for the benefit of the other bookish people who run colleges and universities. It’s designed to test your ability to handle the kinds of academic tasks college students usually have to master: reading textbooks, finding information in reference books, deciphering scholarly journals, studying research abstracts, writing impressive sounding term papers, and so forth.
The hard words on the SAT are hard words of a particular sort: scholastic words that deal, broadly speaking, with the manipulation and communication of ideas—words like ambiguous, amplify, arbitrary, and arcane. The better you master this sort of vocabulary, the better you’ll do on the exam.
Fortunately, you don’t need to find these words on your own. We’ve done the spadework for you. By examining actual SAT exams from the last several years, we’ve been able to list the words most commonly used in reading passages and sentence completions, including both the question stems and the answer choices.
This list became the basis of the SAT Word List, which can be found in the appendix. It includes about 500 primary words that are most likely to appear in one form or another on your SAT exam. It also includes
hundreds of related words—words that are either variants of the primary words (ambiguity as a variant of ambiguous, for example) or that share a common word root (like ample, amplify, and amplitude).
If you make yourself acquainted with all the words in the SAT Word List, you will absolutely learn a number of new words that will appear on your SAT. You’ll earn extra points as a result.
Read More : SAT Guide : VOCABULARY - DOES IT MATTER?
