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Vocabulary questions look like a memory test and are not one. Nobody memorises the dictionary, yet strong candidates answer synonym and antonym items on words they have never met — because English builds most of its long words out of a small set of borrowed parts, and the parts carry the meaning.
See 'benevolent' and you may not know it. See that 'bene' means good, as in benefit and benefactor, and that '-volent' comes from wishing, and the word is already half-solved: someone who wishes well. Meet 'malevolent' on the next line and you have the opposite for free.
This card set covers the four things papers actually test in this block: roots that decode an unfamiliar word, prefixes that build an antonym, the confusable pairs that get reused every single year, and the spellings that are wrong in nearly every question set. Method beats memory here, and it is learnable in an evening.
1. Choose the word most nearly similar in meaning to BENEVOLENT:
2. Choose the word most nearly OPPOSITE in meaning to FRUGAL:
3. In words such as benefactor, benefit and benign, the root 'bene' contributes the sense of:
4. Which of the following words is spelt correctly?
5. The word POLYGLOT means:
6. Which is the correct negative form of the word 'regular'?
7. Fill in the blanks: The guard stood ______ at the gate while the shop next door sold ______.
8. Which statement correctly distinguishes 'affect' from 'effect' in ordinary usage?