The trap answers to this question are “condemned” and “criticized,” for the reader might think that Gina’s friends made some official judgment on her crass manners. Instead, the key phrase is “they did not wish to be associated.” Therefore, they must have acted so as to exclude Gina from their group. When someone is “ostracized,” he or she is excluded from society. The word comes from the name of the hard material on which Greeks would write their decisions to banish someone from society (thus ostracizing them).

Since the sentence states that the principle did his action “in order to prevent” the damages from gum, it is safe to say that he did not merely consider the permission or even “scrutinize” (look carefully at) it. The sense conveyed is that he no longer allowed this permitted act. When someone “revokes” something, he or she literally “calls it back.” The word comes from the prefix “re-”, here used in the sense of “back,” and the “-voke” portion, which means “to call or name.” The latter is found in words like “invoke,” “invocation,” and “provoke.”

Although one might say that Bob is stealing from his parents, the sentence only uses language of using without payment. When someone relies upon another party without giving anything in return, such a person is often called a “leech” from the name for the small worm that often lives by sucking fluid from a host organism. This is what Bob is doing, at least with regard to his parents’ housing, utilities, and food.

"Incite" means to provoke or agitate. "Foster" means to promote or support. "Disdain" means to scorn or despise. "Placate" means to soothe or pacify. "Nullify" means to cancel or revoke.

The contrast in this sentence is between an even temper and something that is “greatly” different to it. When someone is “infuriated,” he or she is extremely angered. The word has an obvious relationship to the English “fury,” which is an extreme form of anger. To be “infuriated” literally means “to be led into extreme anger.”

Although Joseph might be said to have to oversee, study, or review the emails, note that he has to “amend (i.e. change) any remotely offensive wordings;” therefore, his task is more than mere “review” or “perusing.” Instead, he must censor the contents. While we often think of censoring as “bleeping” out offensive words on television, it more broadly means the process of removing anything offensive before something enters the public forum.

The key expression in this sentence is “rarely received any inflow or outflow.” Since the pond had little movement of water, it could be said to “stagnate,” which means having no flow (either of a body of water or air). It comes from the Latin for “pool” in the sense of a “still” body of water.

From the context of the sentence you know that whatever happened to the quality of the material produced caused the company to lose business. From this you can infer that something negative has occurred. Of the five answer choices only compromise matches the context of the sentence. Compromise, in this sense, means to lessen the quality of value of something and is one of the secondary meanings of the word. Enforce means to make people obey a rule; improve means to make better; eradicate means to get rid of; remedy means to fix.

"Ameliorate" means to improve or make better. "Aggrandize" means to cause something to seem or be grander or bigger. "Amalgamate" means to blend or intermix. "Distend" means to inflate from within. "Extol" means to acclaim or sing the praises of.

From the sentence, the best inference we can infer is that the traffic is being moved away from the center of the city. To "expand" means to increase or extend the traffic—clearly, we don't want to do that; the center of the city would be even busier! Likewise, "foster" means to encourage or support the traffic—we don't want to support heavy traffic, we want it to go away! "Cloister" means to contain something in a small space, but this doesn't fit with idea of moving traffic away. "Alter" is very close to the meaning we are looking for; it means to change, but the best answer is "divert," which means to move away from something. It's a little more specific and fits the context of the sentence better.