Today’s SAT question of the day is a vocabulary roller coaster! This hard-difficulty sentence completion begins:

“True to her altruistic beliefs…”

Do you know what altruism is?

I’ll assume that, like many of my students, you are not familiar with that word.  As we read the rest of that sentence, we see that it is some sort of belief about people and money – we just can’t tell if it’s the belief that people are valued based on their monetary value, or the opposite belief.  It’s one of those; that might be enough to get us by.

Now we get to the blanks. Based on her beliefs about people and money and value, Natalie is either in agreement with her co-worker who thinks that people are valuable because they have money, or in disagreement with this co-worker.

If she agrees with her co-workers, she would probably feel that this capitalist attitude is the recipe for success!

If she disagrees, she would probably be sad about this money-focused attitude.

We don’t know which one of these is the right situation, but we can eliminate any answer choices that don’t fit one of these two patterns.

Breaking down the words is up to you today.  And the right answer is….

C.  She lamented his mercenary attitude.

That means that altruistic means something about caring about people, not money – which is correct.

There are many more strategies for handling hard sentence completions – send me an email if you want more help!