When students sign up to take the SAT, they can request that the College Board email a daily Question of the Day to their parents.  These sample questions are usually reminders that the Critical Reading section of the exam was designed for people in their forties or fifties who regularly read The New Yorker. 

But today’s question was contemporary – and provocative.  As students all over the world recover from the stress of yesterday’s test, this SAT Question of the Day imparts a surprising message about the value of higher education. 

Is the College Board, which forces kids to spend months and months studying vocabulary and equations they’ll never use again in their lives, having an existential crisis? 

This Question of the Day could put the CB out of business entirely by motivating high school students to forget about college, and instead go straight to becoming CEOs.

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Choose the word or set of words that, when inserted in the sentence, best fits the meaning of the sentence as a whole.

The CEO of the computer company, who had quit school at the age of 15, was a noted ——-, having taught himself everything he needed to know about computers and business, in addition to working to gain proficiency in such subjects as international copyright law.

1.    pedant
2.    autodidact
3.    demagogue
4.    ambassador
5.    disputant