There are some short cuts the student can use in order to prepare for entrance exams such as the Michigan text. First of all the person has to recognize that the exam is divided into several brackets. One requires a knowledge base of words; the student must be prepared to understand the meaning of a word used to fill a certain context. Often enough he is required to complete a sentence with the best word choice.
Here the student does not necessarily have to know the definition of each word, he can work backwards by eliminating what other possibilities don't make sense. Knowing the exact meaning then is not as important as trying to get the larger picture, that is how the an appropriate word would be complementary to certain passage. Recognizing what words are more complementary than others helps the reader eliminate the words that are unsuitable.
A second part of the test is grammar based and then of course the student should have had some grammar training. Here he can work by intuition too or he can also eliminate choices, which he senses have an incorrect use. This would be a good alternative especially for people who have understood English more through oral practice and whose training has been informal. If there are some similar answers on a multiple choice question then the answer is quite likely going to be one of them.
