SAT Reading and Writing Practice Test: Expression of Ideas

• The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is on a Norwegian island in the Arctic.
• It opened in 2008.
• It stores duplicate samples of seeds held by gene banks around the world.
• The vault is built deep inside a mountain, where the surrounding permafrost helps keep the seeds cold.
• Its purpose is to protect crop diversity in case original seed samples are lost.

• Katherine Johnson was a mathematician who worked for NASA and its predecessor agency, NACA.
• She calculated flight paths for early U.S. human spaceflights.
• Before John Glenn's orbital flight in 1962, Glenn asked that Johnson personally check the calculations made by electronic computers.
• She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.

• The Mariana Trench is in the western Pacific Ocean.
• Its deepest known point, the Challenger Deep, is roughly 11,000 meters (about 36,000 feet) below sea level.
• Mount Everest, the highest mountain above sea level, rises about 8,849 meters.
• If Everest were set on the floor of the Challenger Deep, its peak would still be more than 2,000 meters underwater.

• Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was an American writer and anthropologist.
• She studied anthropology at Barnard College in New York City.
• She collected folktales, songs and sayings in the American South and the Caribbean.
• Her best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was published in 1937.
• The folklore she recorded shaped the dialogue and storytelling in her fiction.

• Alligators and crocodiles are both large reptiles in the order Crocodilia.
• Alligators usually have a broad, U-shaped snout.
• Crocodiles usually have a narrower, V-shaped snout.
• When a crocodile closes its mouth, the large fourth tooth of its lower jaw stays visible; in an alligator, this tooth is usually hidden.

• Mary Anning (1799-1847) collected fossils on the coast near Lyme Regis, England.
• In 1823 she found the first complete skeleton of a plesiosaur, a large marine reptile.
• Leading scientists of her time used her discoveries in their research and publications.
• Because she was a woman, she was not allowed to join the Geological Society of London.

Most bridges are designed to be as rigid as possible so that they move very little under heavy loads. Engineers working in earthquake zones, ______ sometimes take the opposite approach: they place flexible bearings beneath a bridge's deck so that the deck can shift slightly while the ground shakes, reducing the force that reaches the structure.

The town's first public library opened in 1902 in a single rented room above a hardware store, with fewer than five hundred donated books. Over the next decade, residents donated thousands more, and the shelves filled quickly. ______ the collection grew so large that the library moved into its own brick building on Main Street.

Octopuses can change the color and texture of their skin in a fraction of a second, blending into rocks, sand and coral. ______ their eyes appear to contain only one type of light-sensitive pigment, which suggests that they cannot tell colors apart the way humans do. Researchers are still investigating how the animals match their surroundings so closely.

Gopher tortoises, which live in the southeastern United States, dig burrows that can stretch several meters underground. These burrows shelter the tortoises from summer heat, winter cold and wildfires. ______ the burrows are used by many other animals, including gopher frogs and eastern indigo snakes, which take refuge in them.

A rainbow appears when sunlight shines from behind an observer into rain or mist. Light entering each water droplet is bent and reflected, and only droplets at a particular angle from the observer's line of sight send colored light to that person's eyes. ______ two people standing a short distance apart receive light from different droplets, so in a sense each of them sees a slightly different rainbow.