There is no trick to vocab. You just have to study. There are some good books out there which I personally have used a book called Hot Words for the SAT , but at the end of the day, you get what you put in. There is no guarantee that any of the words you use are going to be on the SAT, so you have to make your knowledge base of vocabulary as big as possible. Find what methods work for you, and use them to Break the SAT! Write down words and definitions in a notebook, and try and go through ten new ones a day. Then, at the end of each session, go through the list you have compiled since you started; you'll amaze yourself with how much you can learn if you start small!