—SamanthaYou probably don’t know what any of these words mean. You probably don’t
care what they mean. Once you have finished this book, you still won’t know
what they mean. These words may be interesting and useful to someone. But
they will not be on the SAT. The SAT tests you on the type of words that a
college student would be likely to run into. A college student who ran into any of
these words would suffer a concussion. If the SAT ever uses a huge, obscure
word in a reading passage, it will define it for you in the context of the passage.
The new world of SAT words is defined by the concept of “academic
vocabulary.” There are various ways of formally defining this term, but for the
most part it comes down to the idea that these are words one finds in the general
language of college-level texts. So they aren’t the specialized astronomy terms
one is taught in an astronomy textbook, but they are all the general words that
the astronomy textbook (and other college texts) assumes you know. For the
most part, they are words that you look at and say, “Man, I should know what
that word means, but I don’t. I remember reading it in that article about such and
such, but I can’t quite . . .” Another characteristic of an SAT word is that it isn’t
particularly controversial. It won’t have much to do with sex or violence or
religion or anything that could offend someone. In all probability, you know
more offensive words than the College Board does.
DECODABLE WORDS
One way to get a leg up on SAT vocabulary is to develop a knack for decoding
“decodable” words. These are words that you figure out from some combination
of the context and the roots and stems. For example, the word decodable is a
decodable word. You could decode it like this:
Here’s a list of prefixes that are handy to know: