What do we learn from this? Narrow down your answer choices based on your understanding of the sentence and your predictions, then, if there aren’t synonym pairs remaining, read each choice in the context of the sentence as a whole. They both yield sentences that convey that by themselves, dreams don’t tell us much. Usually these words are not interchangeable, but in the context of this sentence they would shade towards each other in meaning. A poker-face might be inscrutable, while a brochure might be uninformative. “Inscrutable” means that something is not readily interpreted or understood, while “uninformative” means that something does not convey knowledge or information. We can start with our signpost “but.” Since the second clause says that dreams can tell us much, the first clause probably means that by themselves, they are not that informative.Īt first glance, “disordered,” “inscrutable,” and “uninformative” match the sense of contrast that we’re looking for, but no two of these words are strictly synonymous. “Dreams are _ in and of themselves, but, when combined with other data, they can tell us much about the dreamer.” Remember that the instructions for this question type ask you to find two words that would yield two sentences alike in meaning. There are questions, however, where this is not the case and simply looking for synonyms will not yield the correct choices. It’s true that many of the questions will have synonyms as answer pairs. “Craft” and “cunning” here are similar to the idea of care, and opposite to the idea of artless they are the correct pair. Note that “naivete” and “innocence” can be synonymous, but they are not the right answers. We can expect that the end of the sentence clarifies this position, and that the blank word will contrast with what the critics saw as artless.

The implication is that Dickinson’s poetry was not at all simpleminded or artless. If you are actively engaged with this sentence, you’ll notice that “critics…mistook” gives you a big clue as to where it will go. “Early critics of Emily Dickinson’s poetry mistook for simplemindedness the surface of artlessness that in fact she constructed with such _.”

Negative nancy synonyms