SAT Reading and Writing Practice Test: Craft and Structure

Although the committee's first report was only twelve pages long, its recommendations proved ______: within a decade, nearly every city in the region had adopted the building safety codes it proposed.

Before the bridge opened, the island's farmers depended on a single ferry to carry their crops to the mainland. When storms kept the ferry in port for days at a time, fruit spoiled on the docks. The new bridge did more than shorten the trip: it gave growers a steady way to reach buyers, and many of them soon expanded their orchards.

For a long time, many scientists assumed that the deep ocean floor was nearly ______, too cold and dark to support much life. That view changed in the late 1970s, when researchers in a deep-diving submersible found dense communities of tubeworms, clams and crabs living around hydrothermal vents on the Pacific seafloor.

The mayor's proposal for three new parks was not rejected outright, but council members made it clear that their support was ______: they would vote for the plan only if the budget also set aside money to maintain the parks.

Many people imagine a desert as a place where almost nothing ever changes. In the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, one of the driest places on Earth, several years can pass with almost no rain. Yet when an unusually wet year arrives, seeds that have lain dormant in the soil sprout within weeks, and wide stretches of the desert briefly fill with flowers, an event Chileans call the desierto florido, or "flowering desert."

Ada Lovelace is often remembered for the notes she published in 1843 about the Analytical Engine, a calculating machine designed by Charles Babbage. Babbage intended the machine to carry out long numerical calculations. Lovelace, however, suggested that such a machine could work with things other than numbers, such as musical notes, if the relationships between them could be expressed in symbols. For this reason, some historians view her as one of the first people to imagine computers as general-purpose tools.

For decades, some city planners argued that adding lanes to a crowded highway would reduce traffic. At first, the approach can appear to work, since travel times often improve right after the new lanes open. Over the following years, however, faster trips tend to encourage more people to drive and to live farther from work, and congestion gradually returns. Transportation researchers call this pattern induced demand, and it has led many planners to look at alternatives such as better public transit.

At night she lay awake listening for the ocean. There was traffic instead, a low hum that rose and fell like breathing, and now and then a siren drawing a bright line across the dark. She told herself it was the same thing, more or less: a sound that never stopped. By the end of the first week, she had almost started to believe it.

Text 1

Many students now take lecture notes on laptops, and some instructors worry that this habit harms learning. Because most people type faster than they write, students with laptops can copy a lecturer's words almost word for word without deciding what matters. Writing by hand is slower, so it forces students to summarize and rephrase, and that extra mental effort may help them remember the material.

Text 2

Critics of laptop note-taking treat speed as the problem, but speed can also be useful: a fast typist can record more examples and details to study later. What matters most is what students do with their notes afterward. Students who reorganize and summarize their typed notes after class can do the same kind of thinking that handwriting forces during the lecture.

Text 1

After gray wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in the mid-1990s, some ecologists reported that willows and aspens began to recover along streams. They argued that wolves, by hunting elk and making elk wary of lingering in open valleys, reduced the browsing that had kept young trees from growing. In this view, the return of one predator set off a chain of effects across the ecosystem.

Text 2

The story of wolves restoring Yellowstone's streams is appealing, but it may be too simple. Elk numbers were also affected by hunting outside the park, by drought, and by growing numbers of bears and cougars. And along some streams where beavers had disappeared, conditions had changed so much that willows struggled to recover even where elk browsing declined.

The old ferry captain was not a talkative man, and passengers who tried to draw him into conversation usually received a nod and nothing more. On foggy mornings, though, he became almost ______, calling out the names of rocks and buoys as they slid past and telling a story about each one, as if the river were an old friend he was introducing to strangers.