Vocabulary College Prep Essentials — Set 3: Practice flashcards
6 of 34 questions free to study here · 9 topics · the whole deck is built into Willys
Thirty-four sentence-completion questions on the Set 3 words: four choices, one blank, and why the tempting wrong answer fails.
Practice 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 director paired the flood footage with a cheerful brass-band march, and the ______ between what viewers saw and what they heard left many of them uneasy long after the film ended.
A) synergy
B) equilibrium
C) affinity
D) dissonanceD) dissonanceFeelings & Attitudes
A clash between grim pictures and jolly music, jarring enough to unsettle viewers, is dissonance. Synergy is tempting because sound and picture work on viewers together, but synergy is the extra benefit when things work together, and here the music works against the footage. -
Soren denies taking the last strawberries from the fridge, but the evidence against him, a red stain on his sleeve and three green strawberry tops under his bed, is ______: it points his way without proving he ate them.
A) situational
B) circumstantial
C) anomalous
D) unfoundedB) circumstantialSpeaking & Arguing
Clues that point to Soren without directly proving he ate the strawberries are circumstantial. Situational is tempting because a situation is a set of circumstances, but situational means arising from the circumstances at hand and shifting when they shift, and it says nothing about what evidence does or does not prove. -
For a month, the parents who gathered at the playground grumbled about the swing with the cracked seat, yet no one called the parks department; their ______ ended only when the newest parent in the group finally made the call.
A) detachment
B) inaction
C) presumption
D) relianceB) inactionActions & Effort
A month of grumbling while no one makes the call is a failure to act when action is needed: inaction. Detachment is tempting because the parents stood back from the problem, but detachment means being emotionally distant or uninvolved, and parents who grumbled about the swing for a month were far from indifferent. -
Each of the documentary's eight episodes spends most of its hour on the wildlife of a different river, from the Nile to the Mekong, yet a single ______ question unites all eight: who gets the water when there is not enough to go around?
A) auxiliary
B) incidental
C) predominant
D) overarchingD) overarchingSize & Amount
The one question that links all eight episodes into a single series is overarching. Predominant is tempting because the question runs through every episode, but predominant means most common, noticeable or powerful in a group, and wildlife fills most of each hour; the question is not what the series shows most but what links every episode. -
The transit department's yearly report only records how many residents walk to work, but Dr. Lee's guide to street design is openly ______, arguing that every city ought to make walking safe through modest, practical steps such as wider sidewalks.
A) normative
B) utopian
C) comparative
D) quantitativeA) normativeQuality & Judgment
A guide that argues how cities ought to be, judged by values, rather than recording how things are, is normative. Utopian is tempting because the guide pictures better cities, but utopian means based on the ideal of a perfect society or too idealistic to be practical, and these steps are modest and practical. -
From the beach, the family watched the trails of a northbound jet and an eastbound one ______ high overhead, each cutting straight across the other and running on, leaving a giant white X that drifted out to sea until the wind smoothed it away.
A) resonate
B) consolidate
C) intersect
D) cascadeC) intersectNature & Time
Two trails that cut straight across each other and run on, leaving an X, intersect. Consolidate is tempting because the trails come together overhead, but to consolidate is to merge several separate things so they form a single, bigger unit, and these trails stayed two lines: each crossed the other and kept going.
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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 and Cambridge learner's dictionaries; all definitions, notes and example sentences are original.
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