Intro to Triple Blank Sentences
- Introduction to three-blank text completions, highlighting the complexity and variety of sentence structures encountered.
- Strategies for approaching text completions, including reading the entire text for context and inserting personal interpretations to better understand the blanks.
- Detailed walkthrough of a sample text completion exercise, demonstrating how to deduce correct answers through context clues and logical reasoning.
- Emphasis on the necessity of reading deeply to uncover clues for filling in the blanks correctly, rather than relying on surface-level reading.
- The process of elimination and understanding word roots as effective strategies for finding the correct answers.
Q. What makes "sullenly" a better answer choice than "docilely"?
A. For the second blank, I think we can agree that the word "silently" is a pretty good guess for making up our own word. From the second to the third sentence, the character goes from not speaking at all, to speaking nonstop. Knowing this, we can go back to the first blank. We know the characters change a lot (speaking—>not speaking), so they would be rarely _____ ? Stable fits nicely here.
For the second blank, we are looking for a word that means something similar to "silently." This character who is "silent" is retreating off to the corner of the room, and does not want to talk to anyone. "Docilely" indeed is a tempting answer choice, however its connotation stops it from being the perfect answer. "Docile" means that you yield to supervision, or that you go along with things easily. However, in this sentence, the character is NOT going along with things, but rather he is retreating from everyone else and not taking part in the dialogue. "Sullenly" means that you like to be alone, that you're a solitary person, or that you're sulky. This fits perfectly in the blank.
