Vocabulary Preparation for the SAT Test
Imagine a teenager at home one night with a lot of homework to do. It’s late, you’ve just had dinner, you’re feeling tired, you’ve had a rough afternoon, and now you have a ton of homework to do. You take your history book and you start reading and you have like five pages to read, you are reading the text and you come across a word that you have never seen before. What is your job?
What you are supposed to do and what you have been taught to do since childhood is put down your book, pick up your dictionary and look up that word, maybe write a little note to yourself after you have learned the definition, understand the word and context, understand the passage a little better as a whole, and get on with your homework that night.
Let me guess that’s probably not what you would really do if you put yourself in that situation. If you’re like me when I was a kid, what you do is skip the word and keep moving. I think the reasoning you could use to justify that is as follows:
You tell yourself that I am seventeen years old, I am a young adult who works quite well, I have a driver’s license, I have gone out, I have traveled, I have gone to dinner with friends, and I ‘have done a lot of things. I’ve never seen this word before, so what significance could it be? Again, I function well in society, this is a word that is probably a remote and obscure historical word that I will never hear again for the rest of my life anyway; I’m not going to bother stopping to look up this word and even if I had the time, it doesn’t make any sense.
Let me tell you something, on some level I agree with you 100% because I used to do the same thing. In times when you are really under a lot of time pressure, it may not make sense to stop and search for a word. You are going to slow down and you are not going to do all your homework. If you fall into that thought of skipping words often because you don’t feel like taking the time because you feel like you’re smart enough and you’ve never seen this word and it’s not that important, you’re like me, but yes. One favor – in the end you’re going to have trouble on a test like the SAT without really good vocabulary. You’re going to fight like I did when I was younger. If you fall into this category, do me a favor: check out Part 2 of this vocabulary series and I want you to slowly start to change your mind.
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