MANIFEST means clear, obvious, easily seen, and therefore EVIDENT. For example, the 19th century journalist John O’Sullivan coined the famous phrase “Manifest Destiny” to express the popular belief that America had an obvious and self-evident destiny to expand across the North American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
MANIFEST has made regular appearances on SAT vocabulary in context questions for over two years. The good news is that the “most nearly means” questions have only required a straightforward pairing with the synonym EVIDENT.
But there is one noteworthy exception to this pattern of easy questions. One passage presented students with a difficult excerpt from Samuel Beckett’s 1951 novel Molloy. The passage describes a particularly striking scene in which the rays of a setting sun were MANIFEST in “livid tongues of fire darting towards the zenith.” Many confused students chose DWINDLING guessing that this answer best described a setting sun. But the context of the passage suggested that Beckett used MANIFEST to describe something that was clearly visible or evident and therefore PERCEPTIBLE.
MANIFEST – clear, obvious, easily seen and therefore synonymous with EVIDENT