Daily Archives: April 25, 2012

Do you know any, um, how shall we say, difficult people? Yeah, me, too. Here’s a great list of challenging SAT words that all mean, roughly, “hard to get along with.” The subtle differences in meaning, for the philologists out there, follow below. For most folks, especially SAT takers, just knowing that all these words describe people who are, for one reason or another, cranky, hostile, aggressive, difficult, and just plain hard to get along with. belligerent  (“belli” = “war,” as in antebellum) – hostile bellicose – warlike recalcitrant – stubborn and uncooperative intractable – stubborn and unruly truculent – […]

The first two posts in our new Word Clusters series focus on recognizing roots of words to enable you to kill many vocab birds with a single stone. Another highly effective memorization strategy is to group words by synonym rather than alphabetically (as many books unfortunately do). You know how your brain works: sometimes you remember exactly where on the page you read something (e.g., the lower left-hand side) or which words are above and below the word you’re trying to remember. Say you’re working with a list of words organized alphabetically or perhaps randomly, and say you remember the […]