Vocabulary College Prep Essentials — Set 3: In Context flashcards
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Fill the blank: 33 of the Set 3 words, each in a new academic sentence whose clues point to one word (where a second also fits, the back says so).
Learn deck · part of Vocabulary Level 8 · College Prep Essentials · 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 economist felt passionately about railroads, but she owned no shares in either company, so the court accepted her as a ______ witness on the merger.disinterestedCharacter & Behavior
Owning no shares means she has nothing to gain. Dispassionate fails because she feels passionately; disinterested is about having no stake, not about calm feelings. -
The abolitionist's lectures began to ______ only after she replaced tables of figures with stories of separated families, which moved even skeptical audiences.resonateFeelings & Attitudes
Stories that stir listeners make the lectures feel meaningful to them. Crystallize would mean the lectures became clearer, but the change is in what audiences felt. -
Some early psychologists were quick to ______ a single test score with intelligence itself, as if one number could capture every kind of thinking.equateThinking & Knowing
Treating the score as the same thing as intelligence is equating them. Correlate would only link two things that rise and fall together, keeping them distinct.
Also right: confound -
In a formal debate, one team speaks as the ______ of the motion, while the other team, the opposition, argues against it.proponentSpeaking & Arguing
The side arguing for the motion is its proponent. A contrarian takes the unpopular view on purpose, and here the sides are simply assigned. -
Organizers of the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott managed to ______ a network of about 300 cars that carried Black residents around the city for most of the 13-month protest.mobilizeActions & Effort
Organizing cars and drivers into a working system for a shared goal is mobilizing them. Solicit would only mean asking for help, not organizing it into action. -
The grant's reserve for surprises covered one major ______ cost that year: a $4,000 permit fee the city introduced after the budget was written.unforeseenChange & Growth
A fee nobody knew about when the budget was written was unforeseen. Contingent describes a cost that depends on an uncertain event, and this fee was fixed by the city.
Also right: unanticipated -
The library is scanning its map collection in its ______, all 60,000 sheets, so that scholars anywhere can study every one.totalitySize & Amount
The whole of the collection, every sheet, is its totality. Aggregate is a total of many amounts and is used "in the aggregate," and a corpus is a body of writings, not maps. -
The puppet parliament gave the occupied country a ______ of self-rule, but every law it passed had first been approved by the foreign governor.semblanceQuality & Judgment
The parliament offered the look of self-rule with none of the substance. A pretext is usually a false reason for acting, and no one here gives a reason. -
In the novel, the mayor's brand of ______ shows in every speech: he claims to speak for ordinary workers against the bankers and "out-of-touch experts" in the capital.populismSociety & Power
Framing politics as ordinary people versus a powerful elite, and casting oneself as their champion, is populism. Ideology is any political belief system and doesn't name this people-versus-elite appeal; a persona is the image a person shows, not a kind of politics. -
The two counties are ______, sharing a forty-mile border along the river, so a single ambulance service can easily cover both.contiguousNature & Time
Sharing a border makes the counties contiguous. Interconnected would mean linked so each affects the others, which a shared border alone doesn't show.
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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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