SAT words in context questions: how to answer them

The new bridge was designed to ______ heavy winds: its deck is shaped like an airplane wing, so strong gusts flow smoothly around it instead of pushing against its side.

Early reviewers dismissed the novel as slight and sentimental, but its reputation has grown steadily. Critics now regard its quiet portrait of a family farm as ______, a book whose influence can be traced in dozens of later works about rural life.

Historians once assumed that the guild's detailed rulebook described how its members actually worked. Recent studies of surviving account books, however, suggest that the rules were often honored only in the ______: members routinely sold goods below the fixed prices the rulebook demanded.

Rather than ______ the disagreement between the two sources, the historian sets them side by side and explains why each author, given what he could see from his position in the city, might honestly have described the riot as he did.

Many visitors assume the garden's winding paths and wild-looking borders grew up by accident. In fact, the designer's notebooks show that its apparent disorder was carefully ______, with the position of nearly every plant planned years in advance.

Most of the letters in the archive were written in ink that has faded badly. A few, however, remain remarkably ______, and historians can read every word of them without special equipment.

Chef Lucía Ferraro rarely writes down exact measurements. Instead, she ______ her dishes as she cooks, tasting each sauce and adding salt or acid until the balance seems right.

To test whether the drought had changed the forest, ecologist Tamar Oyelaran compared tree-ring samples from before and after the dry years. The difference was ______: rings formed during the drought were less than half as wide as earlier rings.

The city council's new parking rules were meant to be simple, but the signs posted around downtown were so ______ that many drivers could not tell whether they were allowed to park on weekends.

Marine biologist Kofi Asante had expected the young octopuses to avoid the unfamiliar objects placed in their tanks. Instead, they were strikingly ______, approaching each new object within minutes and exploring it with their arms.

Although the composer's late string quartets were admired by a few fellow musicians, audiences of her day found their long silences and abrupt shifts of key ______. Only decades later did listeners begin to hear those features as deliberate and expressive rather than simply odd.

The economist's model makes a ______ assumption: it treats every household as if it had perfect information about future prices. Critics argue that because real households rarely know even next month's prices, the model's predictions should be viewed with caution.

Some urban planners claim that adding lanes to a congested highway reduces traffic only briefly, because the extra space ______ new trips that drivers would otherwise not have made. Within a few years, the widened road is often as crowded as before.

The poet's letters reveal a writer far less ______ than her public image suggested. While interviewers described her as serene and certain, in private she agonized over single words for weeks and repeatedly asked friends whether a finished poem was any good.

In a series of field trials, agronomist Ines Valcourt found that planting clover between rows of corn did not reduce corn yields, as farmers had feared. The clover's benefits to the soil, she argued, therefore came without any ______ cost to the main crop.

The director's adaptations of classic plays are often called radical, but the label is somewhat misleading. Her productions change costumes and settings freely, yet they leave the original dialogue almost entirely ______.

Because the tiny fossil is the only specimen of its kind, paleontologists have been reluctant to draw ______ conclusions from it. Most describe its features carefully but decline to say where the animal belongs on the evolutionary tree until more specimens are found.

Linguist Dara Imamović argues that the spread of a new slang term is rarely as ______ as it appears. When she traced one expression that seemed to appear everywhere at once, she found it had circulated quietly in a few online communities for nearly a decade first.

The treaty's language was intentionally ______. Each government wanted to tell its own citizens that it had won the key concession on fishing rights, so the negotiators chose wording that both sides could read in their own favor.