Why vocabulary?
The Verbal SAT tests your ability to grasp concepts presented in
words, sentences, and paragraphs. What makes it difficult is the strategic
placement of certain unfamiliar words. These words are placed in such a
way that they affect the meaning of the entire phrase, sentence, or passage.
The words, therefore, are extremely important. (If you doubt this idea,
find an analogy or sentence completion question that you can't answer. Open
a dictionary and look up all the unfamiliar words contained in the question.
Then go back to the question and see if it hasn't gotten easier.)
The best way to improve your SAT verbal score is to improve your vocabulary. And to be aware of the land mines that lie waiting for you at every turn in the test.
The English language is filled with contradictions, exceptions to rules, pairs of words that look alike but have opposite meanings, or sound alike but have nothing to do with each other. Every SAT takes advantage of these quirks in the language. They exploit the confusion that's already there, hoping to lure you into wasting time, choosing the wrong answer, or just leaving a blank and moving on to the next trap.
Here's an example:
The word "condemn" means to harshly criticize. The word "condone" means to excuse or approve of. See the problem? Again, the English language is filled with pairs of words just like these. Now let's go back to what we said earlier about the SAT: each question is designed to lead you to the wrong answer. How better to do that than by sprinkling the test with these confusing words? And that's just what our friends who write the SAT questions like to do. What makes this tendency especially challenging is that they know what kinds of mental mistakes students under pressure are likely to make. And so they plant incorrect answers that will look okay to the tired, the frustrated, and the uninformed.
Don't let them do it to you!
Watch this site for additional examples, including more look-alikes and sound-alikes, strange words you'll see only on the SAT, and words you know but don't know you know.