PP1 (Shorter) Verbal Section 1 (Medium) Q8

Pairing Up

First things first. We use the Pairing Strategy to identify any synonym pairs among the six answer choices. There are usually two, sometimes one, sometimes three. We call the "triple pair" the Great White Buffalo.

• Only One Pair: laconic/taciturn

  • In cases such as these, we don't even have to justify our answer with logic, but we should anyway. What if we made a mistake in pairing?

The words solicitous, munificent, irresolute, and fastidious have no pair, so we cross them out: solicitous, munificent, irresolute, and fastidious.

The Right Answer

Use Math Strategy here. The punctuation mark after the word "different," the "--," indicates that the two ideas support each other. The first idea says that these two people are really different. To maintain this logic, we need the opposite of the word "garrulous" for the blank. We can guess words like "quiet" or "shy."

The best match for these guesses is the pair laconic/taciturn.

The Wrong Answers

No other word has a synonym pair, so they're all wrong.