Meaning in context questions

[seychelles1718]

Meaning in context (the author most likely means....) is one of the question types I get wrong often...Is there any strategy to effectively attack this Q type?

Thanks!!!

[ohthatpatrick]

I think these are often hard just because there usually isn't a great answer choice. So, even though we get what is being said in context, none of the answers feel quite right, so we talk ourselves into the bad one.

Some general guidelines:
- ANSWER IN YOUR OWN WORDS before you look at answer choices (this should pretty much go without saying for all RC, but it's very important here that we have our own equivalent synonym in mind)

- PLUG THE ANSWER CHOICE YOU'RE CONSIDERING INTO THE PASSAGE and see if you could swap out what's written with your answer choice and get the same meaning

- IF THE WORD BEING TESTED IS FAMILIAR, then it's probably being used in a secondary meaning kind of way, so there will be a trap answer baiting us in by the most typical dictionary definition of that word

- IF THE WORD BEING TESTED IS ADVANCED VOCAB, then the answer is usually just a synonym for that word.