Today’s official SAT question of the day is a sentence completion with two blanks. Remember that for two-blank sentences your answer choice has to work for both blanks!
So, let’s figure out what words would make sense in these blanks.
The first blank is defined by the first half of the sentence: the conference speakers didn’t like each other, so they were expected to…disagree? Fight? A word along those lines would be a good fit for the first blank.
We have three hints in the sentence for the second blank, so let’s use them! “Although” and “it turned out” tell us that the outcome was the opposite of what was expected – they were expected to disagree, according to what we found for the first blank, so it seems like they ended up agreeing. Hint #3 is in the last bit of the sentence, which tells us that they did indeed avoid squabbling, which is another word for fighting or disagreeing.
We’ve got our own words figured out to replace the missing ones, so let’s see how the answer choices stack up.
Looking at the choices for the first blank, we can eliminate any options that do not mean “disagree”. “Bristle” wouldn’t work – it has to do with disliking something, but it’s not the same thing as arguing – nor would “concur”, which means to agree. (If you didn’t know the meaning of concur, you might recall that the prefix “con” means “with”, like in the word “concentric”, or if you take Spanish you could remember that “con” means “with” all the time!) That eliminates two answer choices.
Looking at the remaining choices for the second blank, we can eliminate any options that do not mean “agree”. “Disagreement” has to go, as does “dissonance” – if you didn’t know what dissonance means, you could at least see that “dis” at the start of the word and remember that it means something like “not”, like in “disassociate” and “disagree”.
That leaves us with just one set of answers: “bicker” and “accord”. Perfect!
No words from the top 100 today, but accord, dissonance, concur, and apathy are good words to know if you haven’t already mastered them.