Vocab practice · 1 of 3
Two witnesses who had never met could corroborate the driver’s story: both saw the same blue van.
Which meaning fits?
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Estimated time
- 35 minutes
- Practice
- Words in Context question bank
What you’ll learn
- Sort the SAT's words about claims by what they do: back a claim up, knock it down, guess, or judge how solid or clear it is.
- Know each word's plain meaning and its charge: positive, negative or neutral.
- Cross out a hard choice by its group and charge, even when you can't define it exactly.
- Tell close pairs apart: refute and rebut, tenuous and spurious, nuanced and opaque.
- Spot words that sound like attacks but name a misreading: misconstrue and conflate.
Why this matters on the SAT
Know what each choice does to a claim
Many SAT texts are about claims: a study backs one up, a critic doubts another, a new finding knocks one down. So the choices are often words for what evidence does to a claim, and the SAT rarely uses the same hard one twice. When the clue gives you a clear prediction, the real question is this: what does each choice do to the claim? Knowing a word's group and charge is often enough to cross it out.
Solution to the example
Clue: after the blank, the entries are used to confirm dates already suggested by shipping logs.
Predict: confirmation, a positive word for backing a claim up.
Cross out by group and charge: a refutation (C) proves a claim wrong, a negative word; a conjecture (A) is a guess, a neutral word; an embellishment (B) adds invented detail, which rather than to invent rules out.
Check: corroboration is backing from more evidence that agrees, here the diary agreeing with the logs, so the answer is D.
A tempts most: only scattered fragments sounds like guesswork, but “Although” turns the blank against that.
SAT example
Although the archive contained only scattered fragments of the diarist’s notebooks, the biographer treated those entries as _____, using them to confirm dates already suggested by shipping logs rather than to invent new episodes.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
- A
a conjecture
- B
an embellishment
- C
a refutation
- D
corroboration
Sort each word by what it does to a claim
Each word in this lesson belongs to a group, by what it does to a claim. Each also has a charge, positive, negative or neutral, as in the first lesson, and the table shows what that means in each group.
| Group | What the words do | Charge | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Backing a claim up | add evidence for it | positive | corroborate, buttress |
| Knocking a claim down | argue or show that it's wrong | negative | refute, rebut |
| A claim without proof | guess or propose | neutral | surmise, speculate |
| How solid a claim is | rate its support | negative if weak, positive if strong | tenuous, unequivocal |
| How clear an idea is | rate how readily it's understood | negative if unclear, positive if clear | opaque, accessible |
A word's group and charge can be enough to cross it out, even when you couldn't define it. If the clue shows evidence going against a claim, the blank is negative, so every word for backing a claim up goes, whatever its exact meaning. So the routine from the first lesson gets one move in its cross-out step:
- Find the clue and its signal.
- Predict the blank in plain words, or at least its group and charge.
- Cross out the choices that don't match: check the words you know, and for a word you half know, use its group and charge.
- Check the choice that's left: does the text show exactly this?
In the examples, the word being taught is bold, and the clue that shows its meaning is underlined.
Words that back a claim up
These words say evidence supports a claim. Their charge is positive, so they fit a blank only when the clue shows evidence agreeing with a claim.
| Word | Plain meaning | Charge |
|---|---|---|
| corroborate | back up with more evidence, often from a separate source | positive |
| substantiate | back up with evidence, show to be true | positive |
| buttress | strengthen, prop up | positive |
| validate | confirm as true or sound | positive |
- Note: The claim
- A diver claims that the wreck she found is the Marta, a ship lost in 1890.
- Correct
- She substantiated the claim with the cargo list, which matched what lay in the hold.
- Correct
- A second team corroborated it: working separately, they read the same name on the ship's bell.
- Correct
- The coins aboard don't prove it's the Marta, but they buttress her case.
- Correct
- When the museum matched the timbers to the shipyard's records, it validated her claim.
Support isn't proof. When a text says evidence doesn't settle a claim but still helps, as the coins do, the blank wants a word for support, like buttress or corroborate, not one that claims proof. And corroborate usually needs a second source that agrees: a team rereading its own notes corroborates nothing.
Read each sentence's clue before you pick a meaning.
In this question, find what the ink analysis does to the case, then look for the word that matches it.
Practice problems
An ink analysis
Practice problem
A historian has argued that a recently discovered letter attributed to a famous abolitionist is a later forgery. However, a chemical analysis of the ink found that its ingredients match those commonly used in the abolitionist’s region during the decade in which the letter was supposedly written. The findings do not conclusively authenticate the letter, but they do _____ the case that it is genuine.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Words that knock a claim down
These words say a claim is argued against or shown wrong. Their charge is negative. Two words at the end of the table sound like attacks but belong to a different kind.
| Word | Plain meaning | Charge |
|---|---|---|
| refute | prove wrong | negative |
| rebut | argue against, try to disprove | negative |
| invalidate | show to be false or without force | negative |
| discount | treat as unlikely or unimportant | negative |
| misconstrue | understand wrongly | negative (a misreading) |
| conflate | treat two different things as one | negative (a misreading) |
- Note: The claim
- A biologist claims that the lake's trout are dying out.
- Correct
- New counts refuted the claim: the trout population had doubled.
- Correct
- The fishing club rebutted it, arguing that her nets were too small, though it offered no counts of its own.
- Correct
- A broken scale invalidated her early data: every weight it recorded was wrong.
- Correct
- Officials discounted her warning, giving more weight to the club's cheerful reports.
- Correct
- A news report misconstrued her claim, saying she blamed anglers when she had blamed warmer water.
- Correct
- It also conflated two lakes, mixing one lake's counts with the other's.
Refute and rebut look alike, but refute says the claim was proved wrong, while rebut usually says only that someone argued against it; the club's rebuttal could still fail. And discount here has nothing to do with prices. Misconstrue and conflate sound like attacks, but they name a misreading. The reporter never argued with the biologist at all, so neither word fits a blank that needs evidence against a claim.
Find each clue first: is the word arguing against a claim, or misreading it?
Vocab practice · 1 of 3
Each time residents complained, the mayor would rebut the complaint, though few of them were convinced.
Which meaning fits?
On this question, decide whether the blank's charge is positive or negative, then cross out the choices that don't match it.
Practice problems
Controlled burns
Practice problem
The conservation biologist often _____ the claims that controlled burns harm forest ecosystems, pointing to decades of data showing that small, periodic fires can actually reduce the severity of wildfires.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Words for a claim made without proof
These words describe a claim that goes beyond the evidence: a guess, a proposal to test, an assumption. Their charge is neutral, neither for nor against the claim.
| Word | Plain meaning | Charge |
|---|---|---|
| hypothesize | propose an explanation to be tested | neutral |
| speculate, speculative | form ideas without firm evidence | neutral, often negative |
| surmise | guess from slight evidence | neutral |
| presume | take as true without proof | neutral |
- Note: The scene
- A geologist finds a huge boulder alone in a flat field.
- Correct
- She hypothesized that a glacier had carried it there, and planned tests to find out.
- Correct
- From a few scratches on its surface, she surmised that it had been dragged.
- Correct
- Reporters speculated about a meteor before anyone had taken a sample.
- Correct
- Farmers had long presumed it was local rock, though no one had ever checked.
Whether these words sound neutral depends on what the text expects. In a lab, a guess is a normal first step. In a review, speculative is a criticism: a speculative biography builds big claims on too little evidence.
Find each clue first: how much evidence is there?
Vocab practice · 1 of 3
Don’t presume the old map is accurate; no one has checked it against the coast in a century.
Which meaning fits?
In this question, ask how much evidence the biologist has before you choose a word for what she can do.
Practice problems
A silent creek
Practice problem
While surveying a creek at dusk, a field biologist noted an abrupt silence where frog calls had been abundant the previous week. With no recent changes in weather or habitat to account for the drop, she can only _____ the cause until further surveys are conducted.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Words for how solid a claim is
These words rate a claim's support, from weak or false to beyond doubt. Weak or false is negative; strong is positive.
| Word | Plain meaning | Charge |
|---|---|---|
| tenuous | weak, thin | negative (weak) |
| spurious | false, not genuine | negative (false) |
| unequivocal | leaving no doubt | positive (strong) |
| indisputable | impossible to argue against | positive (strong) |
Here are four ways a claim about a fertilizer could turn out.
- Note: The claim
- A new fertilizer grows bigger tomatoes.
- Correct
- The evidence was tenuous: one garden, one summer.
- Correct
- The link was spurious: the tomatoes were bigger only because that garden got more rain.
- Correct
- The results were unequivocal: all two hundred gardens showed the same gain.
- Correct
- The gain was indisputable: no one who checked the scales could argue with it.
Weak isn't false. A tenuous claim has little holding it up but may still be true, and more evidence could firm it up. A spurious one only looked real. When a text says the evidence is thin, it wants the first kind; when it shows the result was never real, the second.
Find each clue first: how solid is the claim?
Vocab practice · 1 of 3
Her answer was unequivocal: “No, and I won’t change my mind.”
Which meaning fits?
In this question, ask whether the evidence makes the link weak or shows that it's false.
Practice problems
A diet and memory
Practice problem
Nutrition headlines can be persuasive, but researchers caution against overinterpreting early results. Because the study relied on a small sample and did not control for participants' sleep habits, the link it draws between the new diet and improved memory is _____.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Words for how clear an idea is
These words rate how readily an idea is understood, from hard to follow to open to anyone, plus one, nuanced, for an idea that's complex without being unclear. Unclear is negative; clear is positive.
| Word | Plain meaning | Charge |
|---|---|---|
| opaque | hard to understand | negative |
| obscure | unclear, or little known | negative |
| ambiguous | open to more than one reading | negative |
| nuanced | subtle, showing fine shades of difference | positive (a compliment) |
| accessible | readily understood by anyone | positive |
- Note: The scene
- A museum rewrites the label beside a painting.
- Correct
- The old label was opaque: visitors read it twice and still asked a guard what it meant.
- Correct
- It quoted an obscure poet, one even the curators had to look up.
- Correct
- Its last line was ambiguous: “his later work” could mean the paintings or the letters.
- Correct
- The new label is nuanced: it says the painter admired the king but mocked his court.
- Correct
- Written in short, plain sentences, it is accessible to every visitor.
Complex isn't unclear. Nuanced and opaque can both describe a hard idea, but their charges are opposite: nuanced praises fine distinctions, and opaque faults writing you can't follow. Obscure has three senses: unclear, little known (the poet), and, as a verb, hide, as in clouds obscured the moon. The text decides which one a question uses.
Find each clue first: how clear is the idea?
Vocab practice · 1 of 3
The contract’s wording was so opaque that no one, not even the lawyers who wrote it, could say what it required.
Which meaning fits?
In this question, predict how clear the directions are, then cross out the choices with the other charge.
Practice problems
Recycling directions
Practice problem
Volunteers distributed pamphlets explaining the town's new recycling program. The directions use clear, everyday language instead of technical jargon, making them _____ to residents of all ages.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Example: a claim between support and disproof
In this question, two choices sit at opposite ends of the claim groups, and the answer sits between them.
Worked example
A county government calls its new wildfire-risk map “interpretable,” noting that each neighborhood receives only three numeric ratings. Those ratings, however, come from a contractor’s unpublished model combining dozens of environmental measurements. The model could have a clear rationale, but the county has released no account that would let residents trace the measurements to the ratings. Given only the reason the county offers, its claim of interpretability is _____.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
- A
corroborated
- B
refuted
- C
unsubstantiated
- D
self-contradictory
Step 1
Find the claim and its reason
The county calls its new wildfire-risk map “interpretable,” and gives one reason, noting that each neighborhood receives only three numeric ratings. The last sentence limits the judgment to that reason: Given only the reason the county offers. So the blank says what that reason does for the claim.
Step 2
Predict: backed up or knocked down?
Three ratings say nothing about how the ratings are made, and they come from a contractor’s unpublished model combining dozens of environmental measurements. Residents have nothing to check: the county has released no account that would let residents trace the measurements to the ratings. So the claim isn't backed up.
It isn't knocked down either: The model could have a clear rationale. Predict not backed up, but not disproved.
Step 3
Cross out by group and charge
Corroborated is a word for backing a claim up: supported by more evidence. Nothing in the text supports the claim, so A goes.
Refuted tempts most, because the text plainly doubts the county. But refute means prove wrong, and the text leaves the claim possible: The model could have a clear rationale. B goes too far.
Self-contradictory means saying two things that can't both be true. The county's reason doesn't contradict its claim; it's too thin to support it. D goes.
Step 4
Check the last choice
Unsubstantiated is substantiated with the “not” prefix un-, as in unhappy: not backed up with evidence. A claim that's neither supported nor disproved is exactly that. The answer is C.
- Correct
- Given only the reason the county offers, its claim of interpretability is unsubstantiated: nothing it has released shows how the ratings are made.
Example: new evidence that adds detail
In this question, two choices are words for a weak or false claim, and they sound right for new evidence about a biography. But the clue shows the letters add detail to the portrait, not doubt about it.
Worked example
As the biographer admits, the recently unearthed letters do not overturn her earlier conclusions; rather, they render the portrait more _____ by exposing the hesitations and second thoughts that the original narrative had smoothed over.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
- A
tenuous
- B
axiomatic
- C
nuanced
- D
specious
Step 1
Read the turn
The letters do not overturn her earlier conclusions; rather, they do something else. “Rather” turns away from the idea before it, like the “rather than” of the first lesson: overturning is ruled out, and the blank names what the letters do instead. The clue after “by” says what that is.
Step 2
Predict from the clue
The clue says how the letters change the portrait: by exposing the hesitations and second thoughts that the original narrative had smoothed over. The old portrait was smooth; the new one shows doubts and changes of mind. Predict more detailed, with finer shades.
Step 3
Cross out by group and charge
Tenuous and specious are both words for a weak or false claim. Tenuous tempts most, because letters full of second thoughts sound like they'd weaken a biography. But the hesitations are the subject's: exposing them adds detail to the portrait without thinning the evidence for it, so tenuous doesn't match the prediction. A goes. Specious means seeming true but actually false, and nothing in the text shows the portrait false, so D goes.
Axiomatic means self-evident, beyond question. Showing hesitations makes the portrait less simple, not beyond question, so B goes.
Step 4
Check the last choice
Nuanced means showing fine shades of difference. A portrait that now shows the hesitations and second thoughts has exactly that. Complex isn't weak. The answer is C.
- Correct
- The letters render the portrait more nuanced by exposing the hesitations and second thoughts the original had smoothed over.
Practice problems
These three questions mix the groups, so on each one, find the clue and decide the blank's group and charge before you read the choices.
Waxy sorghum
Practice problem
In greenhouse trials, a waxy coating reduced water loss in every sorghum variety tested. Field measurements likewise confirmed lower water loss in waxy plants at both persistently windy and sheltered sites. Yet waxiness predicted higher grain yield only at windy sites; at sheltered sites, waxy and unwaxy plants yielded similarly. The sheltered-site results therefore _____ the claim that a coating-induced reduction in water loss necessarily gives waxy plants a yield advantage.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Underwater trials
Practice problem
A control algorithm reduced energy use by 14 to 17 percent in each of eighteen underwater trials conducted in steady currents. The report’s discussion of turbulent currents was limited to noting that no tests had been conducted; in its summary, however, the report stated that the algorithm reduces energy use in steady currents. The researchers’ position on this narrower claim was therefore _____.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Deer and the understory
Practice problem
In field notes, an ecologist cited a dense forest understory as evidence that plants consumed by deer were recovering as browsing declined. Species-level data showed, however, that most of the dense growth consisted of ferns deer avoid, while preferred saplings remained scarce. The ecologist's inference therefore _____ an increase in overall plant cover with recovery among species deer actually browse.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?
Finish the lesson
8 practice examples left
Finish the remaining questions correctly to complete this lesson.
Quick recap
- Group and charge: sort a hard word by what it does to a claim and whether it's positive, negative or neutral; that alone can cross it out.
- Backing up and knocking down: corroborate, substantiate and buttress support a claim; refute proves it wrong, while rebut usually only argues against it.
- Misreading isn't attacking: misconstrue and conflate name errors in reading a claim, not arguments against it.
- Weak isn't false, and complex isn't unclear: tenuous differs from spurious, and nuanced from opaque.
- Every question: predict from the clue, cross out by meaning or by group and charge, then check.
Related
For the rest of this group's words and a free quiz, study the evidence and argument words on the SAT vocabulary words page.
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