Direction and strength. Play.
The hardest words-in-context questions aren't testing whether you know a word. They're testing whether you can tell two near-synonyms apart by their charge. Criticize, denounce, question, and note can all fit the same blank grammatically, and only one matches the tone of the sentence.
Loaded Language drills that specific skill: play it here. You place a word by two things at once — whether it's positive or negative, and how strong it is. A word can be right on direction and wrong on strength, which is exactly how the real test traps you: the answer that's the right kind of word but too mild, or too extreme, for what the sentence is actually saying.
Playing it a few times retrains what you're paying attention to. Instead of asking "does this word mean roughly the right thing," you start asking "is this the right strength," which is the question the hard items are really asking.
One takeaway: on tough vocabulary questions, get the direction and the intensity right, not just the general meaning. Most wrong answers miss on strength.
Play at forgesat.com/games/loaded-language.html. Free, no account needed. Everything on Forge is free while it's in beta — including the diagnostic, which tells you where you're actually losing points. Sign up and start there if you're not sure.
Forge is a beta, built by one developer who still teaches full-time. If a word feels mis-placed on the chart, that's a real judgment call and I want the argument — reply or email.