SAT II Literature : Word Choice and Connotation: Prose

Study concepts, example questions & explanations for SAT II Literature

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Example Questions

Example Question #11 : Word Choice And Connotation

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,—or from one of our elder poets,—in a paragraph of to-day's newspaper. She was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister Celia had more common-sense. Nevertheless, Celia wore scarcely more trimmings; and it was only to close observers that her dress differed from her sister's, and had a shade of coquetry in its arrangements; for Miss Brooke's plain dressing was due to mixed conditions, in most of which her sister shared. The pride of being ladies had something to do with it: the Brooke connections, though not exactly aristocratic, were unquestionably "good:" if you inquired backward for a generation or two, you would not find any yard-measuring or parcel-tying forefathers—anything lower than an admiral or a clergyman; and there was even an ancestor discernible as a Puritan gentleman who served under Cromwell, but afterwards conformed, and managed to come out of all political troubles as the proprietor of a respectable family estate. Young women of such birth, living in a quiet country-house, and attending a village church hardly larger than a parlor, naturally regarded frippery as the ambition of a huckster's daughter. Then there was well-bred economy, which in those days made show in dress the first item to be deducted from, when any margin was required for expenses more distinctive of rank. Such reasons would have been enough to account for plain dress, quite apart from religious feeling; but in Miss Brooke's case, religion alone would have determined it; and Celia mildly acquiesced in all her sister's sentiments, only infusing them with that common-sense which is able to accept momentous doctrines without any eccentric agitation. Dorothea knew many passages of Pascal's Pensees and of Jeremy Taylor by heart; and to her the destinies of mankind, seen by the light of Christianity, made the solicitudes of feminine fashion appear an occupation for Bedlam. She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in gimp and artificial protrusions of drapery. Her mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own rule of conduct there; she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractations, and then to incur martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it. Certainly such elements in the character of a marriageable girl tended to interfere with her lot, and hinder it from being decided according to custom, by good looks, vanity, and merely canine affection. With all this, she, the elder of the sisters, was not yet twenty, and they had both been educated, since they were about twelve years old and had lost their parents, on plans at once narrow and promiscuous, first in an English family and afterwards in a Swiss family at Lausanne, their bachelor uncle and guardian trying in this way to remedy the disadvantages of their orphaned condition.

(1871) 

Which offers the best definition of "huckster" in the context of the passage? 

Possible Answers:

an obsequious clerk 

none of these 

a showy salesman 

an ambitious servant 

a well-heeled porter

Correct answer:

a showy salesman 

Explanation:

A huckster is someone who sells goods in a showy way, often with the implication of some kind of disingenuousness. 

Passage adapted from Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871)

Example Question #111 : Overall Language Or Specific Words, Phrases, Or Sentences

Passage adapted from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) 

"Presentiments are strange things! and so are sympathies, and so are signs ; and the three combined make one mystery to which humanity has not yet found the key. I never laughed at presentiments in my life, because I have had strange ones of my own. Sympathies, I believe, exist (for instance, between far-distant, long-absent, wholly estranged relatives ; asserting, notwithstanding, their alienation, the unity of the source to which each traces his origin), whose workings baffle mortal comprehension. And signs, for aught we know, may be but the sympathies of nature with man."

Based on the information given in the passage, sympathies are to signs as ______________.

Possible Answers:

man is to presentiments and Man is to strange things

man is to relative and man is to nature

man is to nature and Man is to relatives

man is to strange things and Man is to presentiments

man is to alienation and Man is to nature

Correct answer:

man is to relative and man is to nature

Explanation:

The answer is as "man is to relatives and as man is to nature." The wording of this question may strike you as confusing but upon a second read it becomes quite clear. Sympathies are explained by their relation to relatives (which narrows the answer down to two options immediately) and signs are then explained by comparing them to sympathies, but of nature. Thus the dichotomy of sympathies with relatives and signs with nature becomes clear. Also, it is important to recognize that with this question order matters, sympathies and then signs, relatives and then nature.

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