Vocabulary College Prep Advanced — Set 2: In Context flashcards
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Fill the blank: 33 of the Set 2 words, each in a fresh sentence whose clues point to exactly one word, with the deciding clue and the tempting rival explained.
Learn deck · part of Vocabulary Level 9 · College Prep Advanced · written against: Our own grade placement (VOCABULARY-PLAN.md): word frequency (wordfreq, CC BY-SA 4.0) and editorial review; no publisher's grade or word list is reproduced. Updated 2026-10-10.
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The ______ timber barons stripped whole valleys bare, bribing officials and sending armed guards to drive off settlers from land that was never theirs.rapaciousCharacter & Behavior
Seizing land by force and taking far more than is fair is rapacious. Acquisitive and covetous describe wanting or gaining more, not grabbing it by force. -
Jun sat ______ over the old city map, deaf to the librarian's closing-time announcement and blind to the lights going off around him.raptFeelings & Attitudes
So absorbed that he notices nothing else is rapt. Agog means eagerly excited, often about something to come, and nothing shows Jun excited or waiting; he is lost in the map. -
A few old rivals still grumbled that the young chemist's result felt wrong, but once three independent labs had repeated her test, they had nothing left to argue with: her proof was ______.incontrovertibleThinking & Knowing
Proof that leaves no room for reasonable argument is incontrovertible. Indubitable describes something nobody could doubt at all, and her rivals still doubt it; they simply cannot argue against the evidence. -
Mr. Blythe, the garden club's newest member, rose at every meeting to ______ on soil and compost, waving away the master gardeners' questions as if none of them could possibly know better.pontificateSpeaking & Arguing
Holding forth pompously, as if no one else could be right, is to pontificate. Opine simply means to give an opinion, and moralize means to lecture about right and wrong, not soil. -
Because she had once worked for the company under review, the scientist chose to ______ herself from the panel's safety assessment.recuseActions & Effort
If a personal stake could bias your judgment and you bow out of the decision for that reason, you recuse yourself. To efface yourself is to keep modestly in the background, not to leave a decision over a conflict, and adjudicate is the judging she gives up. -
Astronauts on the space station ______ dehydrated meals by injecting water into the sealed pouches.reconstituteChange & Growth
Restoring dried food by adding water is to reconstitute it. Transmute means changing something into a wholly different form, not back to what it was. -
Tokyo and the dozens of suburbs that have grown into it form a single urban ______ of more than thirty million people, among the largest on earth.agglomerationSize & Amount
A large city merged with its built-up suburbs is an agglomeration. A welter is a confused jumble of things, not a city region. -
Harpsichord, fugues and minuets: the young composer wrote her suite entirely in an eighteenth-century style, a loving ______ that some listeners mistook for a lost work by Bach.pasticheQuality & Judgment
An affectionate tribute written in an older era's style is a pastiche. Kitsch is showy art in poor taste, which a careful Baroque imitation is not. -
The new coach replaced the entire training staff with his old college roommates, none of whom had coached before, and parents complained loudly about the ______.cronyismSociety & Power
Handing jobs to friends instead of qualified people is cronyism. Patronage in this sense means government jobs given as political rewards, and a coaching staff is no political prize. -
The pastry chef spun sugar into ______ strands so fine and light that a single breath could have lifted the whole nest off the cake.gossamerNature & Time
So fine and fragile that it seems to weigh almost nothing is gossamer. Lilliputian means tiny, but these strands are thin and airy, not small.
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Review status: Second-reader reviewed, with corrections applied.
Checked against:
- Senses, parts of speech and sense order checked against Merriam-Webster.com, the American Heritage Dictionary and the frequency-ordered Oxford, Longman and Cambridge learner's dictionaries; all definitions, notes and example sentences are original.
- Grade placement is our own, from wordfreq frequency data (CC BY-SA 4.0) and editorial review; no publisher's grade or word list is reproduced.
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