With the help of reports from Reddit's r/SAT, I’ve compiled a list of the highest frequency words from 2024 and 2025 and analyzed those trends in my 2026 report. I've put these into a quiz format for students and parents to challenge themselves. Good luck!

SAT High-Frequency Vocabulary - Round 2 - Warm-up Reading Passage

Instructions: Read this passage carefully before taking your quiz. All 13 vocabulary words represent frequently tested SAT words from 2024-2025. Pay attention to how each word is used naturally in the story.

The Forensic Accountant

Elena Vasquez had spent fifteen years as a forensic accountant, but the Meridian Corporation case would prove to be the quintessential example of corporate fraud—the most perfect illustration of everything she had trained to detect. The scheme was elaborate, spanning three continents and involving dozens of shell companies designed to obscure the movement of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Her investigation began when she noticed anomalous patterns in the quarterly reports. The irregular data points deviated significantly from expected norms: revenue figures that seemed impossibly consistent, expense categories that fluctuated in ways that defied standard business cycles. Something was clearly wrong, even if she couldn't yet prove what.

The company's public image seemed to belie its internal reality. The cheerful press releases and glossy annual reports gave a false impression of corporate health, contradicting the troubling evidence Elena was quietly assembling. Executives smiled confidently at shareholder meetings while privately authorizing transactions that would later prove devastating.

Elena knew she needed to enumerate every suspicious transaction systematically. She created detailed spreadsheets that listed each questionable entry one by one, documenting dates, amounts, authorization codes, and the names of approving officers. This methodical cataloging would prove essential when prosecutors eventually built their case.

The evidence she gathered would ultimately vindicate the whistleblower who had first raised concerns three years earlier. That junior analyst had been dismissed as paranoid, his warnings ignored, his career effectively destroyed. Elena's findings would clear his name and prove he had been right all along.

What troubled her most was how the fraud had served to undermine public trust in the entire industry. The scheme hadn't just harmed Meridian's investors; it had gradually weakened confidence in corporate governance across the sector, making legitimate companies' fundraising efforts more difficult.

The connection between certain executives and offshore accounts remained tenuous at first. The links were weak and indirect, based largely on circumstantial evidence that might not survive legal scrutiny. Elena needed something more concrete before she could make formal accusations.

Her breakthrough came when she discovered that someone had attempted to transpose two columns in a critical database—switching the positions of sender and recipient information to disguise the true direction of fund transfers. This seemingly minor manipulation revealed a deliberate effort to deceive auditors.

The scheme's complexity served to underscore just how sophisticated modern financial crime had become. The case emphasized and highlighted the need for better regulatory oversight and more rigorous auditing standards across the industry.

Elena's final report would precede the formal criminal investigation by several weeks. Her preliminary findings came before the FBI's involvement, giving prosecutors a roadmap for their subsequent inquiry and saving months of duplicated effort.

The CEO's calm demeanor during the initial board meeting evinced no hint of the panic he must have felt internally. His composed exterior clearly revealed nothing of his true emotional state, though Elena suspected he already knew the investigation was closing in.

Some board members argued that paying larger fines would ameliorate the company's legal exposure—that making the situation better through financial settlements would be preferable to prolonged litigation. But Elena knew the evidence pointed toward criminal charges that no settlement could resolve.

The contrast between Meridian's stated values and actual practices was utterly incongruous. The company's ethics handbook spoke eloquently about integrity and transparency, yet these principles were completely incompatible with the systematic deception Elena had documented.

When the indictments finally came, they named seventeen executives across four countries. The case would take years to fully adjudicate, but Elena's meticulous documentation ensured that the truth would eventually emerge. Justice, she reflected, often moves slowly—but thorough preparation makes it inevitable.

Vocabulary words practiced: quintessential, anomalous, belie, enumerate, vindicate, undermine, tenuous, transpose, underscore, precede, evince, ameliorate, incongruous