Vocabulary College Prep Advanced — Set 1: Practice flashcards
6 of 33 questions free to study here · 10 topics · the whole deck is built into Willys
Thirty-three sentence-completion questions on the Set 1 words: four choices, one blank, context clues that settle it, and why the most tempting wrong answer fails.
Practice 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 6 sample questions as a list
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Whatever the factory owner ordered, Briggs did at once: he fired workers who complained, spied on union meetings and never questioned a single command, the very model of a ______.
A) martinet
B) turncoat
C) gadfly
D) lackeyD) lackeyCharacter & Behavior
Carrying out every order of a powerful boss without question makes Briggs a lackey. Martinet is tempting because it involves obedience, but a martinet is the one who demands it, and Briggs only gives it. -
The time capsule sealed by the class of 1925, crammed with jazz records, stock tips and car ads, preserves the restless, get-rich-quick ______ of its decade.
A) panoply
B) zeitgeist
C) denouement
D) intelligentsiaB) zeitgeistThinking & Knowing
The restless, get-rich-quick mood of a decade is its zeitgeist. Panoply is tempting because the capsule holds many things, but a panoply is an impressive array, and "restless" describes a mood, not a collection. -
What was meant to be a two-week software upgrade became a ______ for the school district: every fix broke something else, and a year later teachers still could not enter grades.
A) maelstrom
B) quagmire
C) crucible
D) lacunaB) quagmireActions & Effort
A project in which every fix breaks something else, still dragging on a year later, is a trap that is hard to escape: a quagmire. Maelstrom is tempting, but a maelstrom is violent, sweeping turmoil, not a slow trap. -
Road crews traced last week's ______ of flat tires, eleven on Route 9 in three days, to a box of roofing nails spilled from a truck.
A) welter
B) spate
C) groundswell
D) accretionB) spateChange & Growth
Eleven flat tires in three days is a sudden cluster of the same kind of trouble: a spate. Welter is tempting, but a welter is a confused jumble of things, and these are separate incidents in quick succession. -
For the retiring train conductor's farewell, the town gave him the brass whistle he had blown at every departure for thirty years, a gift so ______ that no one could imagine a better match.
A) apropos
B) passé
C) tangential
D) risibleA) aproposQuality & Judgment
A conductor's own whistle as his retirement gift fits the occasion exactly: apropos. Passé is tempting because the whistle is old, but passé means out of fashion, and the sentence praises how well the gift fits. -
Fossils show that the first flowering plants and the dinosaurs were ______: early blossoms spread across the land while giant sauropods still browsed its forests.
A) atavistic
B) vernal
C) contemporaneous
D) superannuatedC) contemporaneousNature & Time
Blossoms spreading while sauropods still browsed means the two belonged to the same era: contemporaneous. Vernal is tempting because of the blossoms, but vernal means having to do with spring, and the clue is about the same age, not a season.
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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.
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