SAT Reading and Writing Practice Test: Cross-Text Connections

Text 1

Many city officials describe street trees mainly as decoration. Planting trees along sidewalks, they argue, makes neighborhoods more attractive and can raise property values, which is reason enough to fund it.

Text 2

Ecologist Priya Raman compared temperatures on city blocks with and without street trees. On summer afternoons, the shaded blocks were several degrees cooler, and nearby buildings used less electricity for air-conditioning. Raman argues that tree planting should be treated as a matter of public health and energy use, not only of appearance.

Text 1

The printing press transformed Europe in the 1500s because it made books far cheaper. Once a pamphlet could be produced by the thousands, new ideas spread to readers in every town within weeks.

Text 2

Most Europeans in the 1500s could not read. Printed pamphlets still reached them, though: they were read aloud in taverns, markets and churches, where one literate person could share a text with dozens of listeners. The press mattered, but much of its influence passed through people who heard printed words rather than read them.

Text 1

Children learn the grammar of their first language mainly by imitation. They hear adults speak, store the sentences they hear and repeat them, gradually building up a collection of correct forms.

Text 2

Young English-speaking children often say things like "goed" and "mouses." Adults almost never use these forms, so children cannot have copied them. Instead, such errors suggest that children work out general rules, such as adding -ed for the past tense, and then apply them even where they do not fit.

Text 1

Novelist Grace Lindqvist outlines every chapter before she writes a single page. In her view, knowing the whole plot in advance saves weeks of revision, because she never writes scenes that lead nowhere.

Text 2

Novelist Tomás Ferreira starts with a character and a single situation and discovers the plot as he drafts. Outlines, he says, made his early books feel mechanical. He accepts that he will throw away many pages during revision and considers that a fair price for stories that surprise him.

Text 1

The best place for a large telescope is in space. Earth's atmosphere blurs starlight, so even the biggest telescope on a mountaintop cannot produce images as sharp as one in orbit.

Text 2

Engineers have developed adaptive optics, flexible mirrors that change shape hundreds of times per second to cancel out much of the blurring caused by the atmosphere. With this technology, some ground-based telescopes now produce remarkably sharp images, and ground telescopes can be built much larger than space telescopes and repaired far more easily.

Text 1

Some school districts have stopped teaching handwriting after the early grades. Since students now type most of their assignments, these districts argue, class time is better spent on keyboarding and other digital skills.

Text 2

Psychologists studying note-taking have found that students who write notes by hand often remember the main ideas of a lecture better than students who type. One explanation is that handwriting is slower, so students must summarize ideas in their own words instead of copying what they hear word for word.

Text 1

Museum director Ana Ruiz argues that museums should return artifacts that were taken from other countries during colonial rule. Keeping such objects, she says, continues an injustice, and museums should adopt a clear policy of returning them.

Text 2

Curator Daniel Osei agrees that many objects in museum collections were taken unfairly and should go back. But he warns against a single rule for every case. Some objects were bought or traded openly, he notes, and records of how each item was acquired should guide each decision.

Text 1

For much of the twentieth century, scientists pictured dinosaurs as slow, cold-blooded animals, much like oversized modern lizards. Their great size, it was thought, would have made rapid growth and an active life impossible.

Text 2

Thin slices of dinosaur bone viewed under a microscope tell a different story. Many dinosaur bones show patterns of rapid growth with dense networks of blood vessels, features that today are found mainly in fast-growing birds and mammals rather than in lizards.

Text 1

Many office workers believe they get more done when they answer email, join a video call and edit a report at the same time. Doing several tasks at once, they say, is the only way to keep up with a busy schedule.

Text 2

Psychologists who study attention say that the brain rarely performs two demanding tasks at the same moment. Instead, it switches rapidly between them, and each switch costs a little time and raises the chance of mistakes. Over a full day, these small costs can add up.

Text 1

Fresh vegetables are always more nutritious than frozen ones. Freezing, a chef argues in a recent cookbook, robs vegetables of their vitamins, so cooks should buy fresh whenever possible.

Text 2

Food scientists point out that many frozen vegetables are frozen within hours of harvest, which slows the loss of vitamins. "Fresh" vegetables, by contrast, may spend a week or more being shipped and stored before they are eaten, losing some vitamins along the way. In tests of certain vegetables, frozen samples kept as much or more of some vitamins as fresh ones.