Question

he believes himself to be an intellect, even though the only books he owns are contemporary comics and joke encyclopedias


Change believes to belief
Change intellect to intellectual
Change contemporary to contempt
Change joke to joker

Give you a medal 

Answer 1

What you can do here is go through all the choices and read the sentence replacing the word they tell you to replace. Let's start with A.
A. He belief himself to be.... This is clearly very incorrect. Now on to B.
B. He believes himself to be an intellectual.... I* believe that this would be correct.
C. is incorrect because contemporary means current with present time, which makes sense in the sentence. While as contempt is not suiting for the use it's listed for.
D. I believe that D. would be incorrect as well.