A Sentence Completion question: Professor Meursault is our star

The best answer is A. If you understand all the vocabulary words, this question should be relatively easy. The point here is that our Professor Meursault is a very educated and learned person, but he does not show off his knowledge. Answer choice (A) works well to express that meaning; the other answer choices do not.

A few tips–first, the word for the first blank must be a word with positive connotations because of the word “revered”–one wouldn’t be revered for bad qualities, at least not on the SAT. Second, the second blank needs to mean something that contrasts or is otherwise not directly related to the part of the sentence about Meursault’s showing “great humility in dealing with his students” and not making “a show of his erudition”. How do we know this? The phrase “in fact” is used to signal something surprising or unexpected. (Remember that!)
If you have any questions, please post them below in the comment section. I’ll try my very best to answer them. :)