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Free SAT Words in Context practice questionsdigital SAT, 2026 format

Either a blank that needs the most precise word, or a question about what a word 'most nearly means' in a passage, often from literature. Context decides; the common meaning of the word is the usual trap.

Answer each question, then read why the right answer is right and why the tempting one is wrong.

Question 1

Reading and Writing
The physicist Lise Meitner's contribution to the discovery of nuclear fission was, for decades, ______ in official accounts: her collaborator Otto Hahn received the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alone, and many textbooks did not mention her name at all.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

Question 2

Reading and Writing
In her fieldwork among Trobriand Islanders, the anthropologist Annette Weiner noticed that earlier ethnographers had ______ the exchange of banana-leaf bundles among women, treating it as a domestic footnote to the men's ceremonial trade; her own analysis placed those bundles at the center of the islands' economy.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

Question 3

Reading and Writing
The following text is from Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick.
 
Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul . . . then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

As used in the text, what does the word "spleen" most nearly mean?

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