Today’s SAT question of the day is a two-blank sentence completion with no obvious clues.

After giving the sentence a quick read, you can come up with at least two possible sets of words that would make sense:

Either the performance contained a good mix of elements and was declared good by the critic, or it contained a bad mix of those elements and was declared bad. Basic vocabulary is fine here – the point is that either set of words would work fine in the blanks, and therefore we must rely on the relationship between the two words to help us sort out the correct answer.

It wouldn’t make sense in context to mix the words – a bad performance that is declared good, for example – so we need to find a set of answer choices that have similar meanings.

B is a great choice – those words roughly mean “awkward” and “mess” if you’re not familiar with them. Every other set of answer choices contains words with contrasting definitions, but B’s words are similar.