October 2026 SAT: vocab traps, two-part graphs and hidden constants

A passage about superheroines like the Invisible Woman said her teammates kept telling her to stay out of fights. The options were admonitions, veneration, obfuscation and exonerations.

Lots of people picked veneration. It means deep respect, and a passage about heroes feels like it should be about respect. But nobody in the sentence is admiring her.

Admonitions means warnings. Being told again and again to stay back is a warning, and that’s the whole sentence. A second question worked the same way. A king whose finances didn’t match his era was incongruous, while exemplar pulled people in because he was the passage’s main example.

A bar graph compared predicted and observed plant growth early and late in the season. The early bars were all large and positive. The late bars were all negative. Researchers said late growth is harder to predict.

An option ranking the late-season bars by site. It’s true, and it’s about the late season, so it looks on topic. But it never shows that late is worse than early.

The option that set strongly positive early against negative late at every site. A question on wind and solar power worked the same way. Two countries had land ratios under 1 and one had a ratio over 1, so the student was partly right.

A researcher had 38 bears and wanted to know if a new diet makes them hibernate longer. Which design lets you say the diet caused the change?

Picking 19 of the 38 bears at random. It has the word random in it, so it feels like the statistics answer. But random selection doesn’t decide which bear gets which diet.

Randomly assign the diets, 19 bears to each. That balances everything else between the groups, so a difference comes from the diet. The other question surveyed gamers in 3 countries and generalized to all gamers. That fails because the sample wasn’t drawn at random from all gamers.

The function was f(x) = a(x + 54)(x + b)(x + c), with a, b and c positive, and f(0) = p. Is p greater than, equal to, or less than 54bc?

Saying p is greater than 54bc. Plug in 0 and you get p = 54abc, and if you picture a as a whole number like 2, then p is 108bc. That looks bigger every time.

Try a = 1/2. Then p is 27bc, which is smaller than 54bc. With a = 1 they’re equal. Since a can be any positive number, there isn’t enough information, and that was the answer.

The equation was 12(w + a)(w + 5) = 4(w + 5), and the sum of the solutions was 34/3. Find a.

Dividing both sides of the equation by (w + 5). You’re left with 12(w + a) = 4, so w = 1/3 minus a. Treat that as the only solution, set it equal to 34/3, and a comes out as -11.

Move everything to one side and factor out (w + 5). Now the solutions are -5 and 1/3 minus a. Their sum is -14/3 minus a, and setting that equal to 34/3 gives a = -16.

The acute angles were r and s, with 5r greater than 18s. The options included sin r, cos s and sin r divided by sin s.

Picking sin r, because r is the big angle. Since r + s = 90, the inequality makes r more than 70.4 degrees. So sin r is about 0.94, which is large, but still under 1.

In a right triangle, sin s equals cos r. So sin r divided by sin s is tan r. With r over 70.4 degrees, tan r is more than 2.8, bigger than any sine or cosine can be. And cos s is exactly sin r, so it can’t win either.

A sentence said a power plant made less electricity than planned, then continued with a reason. The blank held the word though, with options like , though; and , though,.

, though; because the semicolon looks formal and the sentence is long. But a semicolon needs a full sentence after it, and the words that followed only gave a reason.

, though, with a comma on each side. Here though interrupts the sentence, so it gets fenced off like any aside. Another question used the same test. The words after the blank were a list, so a colon beat both semicolon options.