Today’s official SAT question of the day is a sentence completion about regulations on laboratory animals. We’ve got two blanks, so we have to make sure that our answer works for both blanks – but we also get twice as many chances if we need to eliminate some implausible answer choices.

For the first blank, we know that the policies used to be … something … but they are now mandatory.  For the second blank, we know that it’s something in relation to the policy that would cause labs to lose their grants.

If something is now mandatory, it must previously have been optional.  If a lab is going to use its grant, it must have done something bad in relation to the policy – probably something like going against it.

Looking at the answer choices, there is truly only one option that makes sense for the first blank: recommended.  Luckily, the second half of the answer choice is perfect as well: violators. We have found the answer that perfectly matches our own words for this easy-level question.

No words from our top 100 words appear in this set of answer choices, but if you aren’t familiar with the definitions for nominal and compulsory, you might want to add those to your flashcards.  Hints:

The museum’s “dollar days” promotion offered entry for only a ________________ fee so that new patrons could visit the museum at a low cost.

The entry fee, however, was ________________; everyone was required to pay in order to visit the museum.