SAT Reading and Writing Practice Test: Full Module (27 Questions)

The city introduced the new bus schedule as a ______ measure: officials said it would stay in place only until repairs to the Harbor Street bridge were finished in the spring.

Reviewers admired the technical precision of the young violinist's first recording but found her playing somewhat ______: every phrase was clean and correct, yet few of them seemed to express any particular feeling.

Before setting out, Rosa compared her grandfather's hand-drawn map of the valley with a recent satellite image. She had expected the old map to be little more than a keepsake, but it proved remarkably sound: nearly every trail and stream it showed was still where he had drawn it.

Many frogs lay hundreds of eggs at a time and then leave them to survive on their own. The strawberry poison frog of Central America is a far more ______ parent: after the eggs hatch, the mother carries each tadpole on her back to its own small pool of water, often inside a plant, and returns again and again to feed it eggs that she lays for that purpose.

Visitors to tropical islands often assume that the white sand beneath their feet was ground from rock by waves. On many coral reefs, though, a large share of the sand has passed through the bodies of parrotfish. These fish use their beaklike teeth to scrape algae from coral and rock, swallowing bits of the hard surface along with their food. They grind this material into fine grains and release it as sand, which currents then carry toward shore.

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jane Jacobs challenged a popular approach to city planning that separated homes, shops and offices into different zones. Jacobs argued that streets with a mix of uses stay busy at all hours, and that the steady presence of shopkeepers, residents and passersby, which she called "eyes on the street," helps make a neighborhood safer.

Text 1

In 2018, a research team reported that red markings on cave walls at three sites in Spain were at least 64,000 years old. The team dated thin mineral crusts that had formed on top of the markings, so the paint had to be older than the crusts. Because modern humans are not known to have reached Europe that early, the team concluded that Neanderthals made the markings.

Text 2

Other researchers have questioned those dates. The uranium-thorium method used on the crusts assumes that no uranium moved into or out of them after they formed. If water had washed some uranium out, the crusts would appear older than they really are, and the case for Neanderthal painters would be weaker.

Mira had told anyone who would listen that her younger brother's chess club was a waste of perfectly good Saturdays. When Ilan reached the final round of the city tournament, however, she took a seat in the front row of the auditorium. She could not follow most of the moves. Still, each time he leaned back and rubbed his eyes, she leaned forward, and when his opponent finally tipped over her king to resign, Mira was on her feet before anyone else had begun to clap.

Most plants take in carbon dioxide during the day through tiny pores called stomata, but open stomata also let water escape. Many cacti and other desert plants follow a different schedule. They open their stomata at night, when the air is cooler and more humid, and store the carbon dioxide they absorb in the form of an acid. During the day, with their pores closed, they release the stored carbon dioxide inside their tissues and use it for photosynthesis.

In a short story, the narrator describes her friend Leona at a crowded gallery opening. The narrator presents Leona as someone who notices details that other people overlook.

Traffic noise in cities is concentrated at low pitches. Researchers studying great tits, a common European songbird, hypothesize that birds living in noisy parts of a city change their songs so that the songs can still be heard over this background noise.

A student studying community gardens recorded the number of plots rented at four city gardens in 2023 and 2025.

The student notes that, of the four gardens, the one with the largest increase in rented plots from 2023 to 2025 was ______

Most fig species can be pollinated only by one or a few species of tiny wasps. A female wasp crawls into a young fig through a narrow opening, carrying pollen from the fig where she hatched. Inside, she pollinates the fig's flowers and lays her eggs, and her offspring later leave carrying pollen of their own. Because each kind of fig depends on such a narrow group of pollinators, the disappearance of a fig's wasp partner from a region would most likely mean that ______

Young sunflower plants turn their heads to follow the sun from east to west during the day and swing back to face east overnight. Once the flowers mature, they stop moving and remain facing east. In experiments, researchers found that east-facing flower heads warmed up faster in the morning than heads turned to face west, and that the warmer flowers received more visits from bees and other pollinators. These findings suggest that, for a mature sunflower, facing east ______

Katsushika Hokusai's woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa, made around 1831, is one of the most widely recognized images in the ______ because it was printed from carved wooden blocks, thousands of copies could be made from a single design.

Since the 1960s, ocean scientists have used submersibles and diving suits to study the deep sea firsthand. In 1990, the ______ became the first woman to serve as chief scientist of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Each team in the river cleanup project received a kit with everything it needed to check the health of the ______ strips for testing acidity, a thermometer, and a fine net for catching insect larvae.

The axolotl, a salamander native to the lakes and canals of the Valley of ______ can regrow lost limbs, parts of its spinal cord and even damaged heart tissue.

The old train station in Calder Falls reopened last year as a public market. The patterned tiles that cover the floor of its main hall ______ laid by hand in 1911, according to records kept by the town.

In 1928, the Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming noticed that a mold growing on one of his laboratory dishes had killed the bacteria around it. This chance observation ______ to the development of penicillin, one of the first antibiotics to be widely used.

Baleen whales have no teeth. Instead, they filter small animals from seawater using plates made of keratin, the same material as human fingernails. Each species, however, uses ______ baleen plates in a slightly different way: some skim slowly along the surface, while others gulp huge mouthfuls of water at once.

Fireflies use flashes of light to find mates, and each species has its own pattern of flashes that males and females recognize. ______ females of some Photuris fireflies imitate the flash patterns of other species. When a male of another species flies down to meet what looks like a potential mate, the Photuris female catches and eats him.

Venice was built on more than one hundred small islands in a shallow lagoon, where the ground is soft mud and sand. To create stable foundations, builders drove millions of wooden piles deep into that soft ground. ______ many of the city's stone churches and palaces stand on supports made largely of wood.

Making paper by hand takes several steps. First, plant fibers are soaked and beaten in water until they break down into a soupy pulp. Next, the papermaker dips a framed screen into the pulp and lifts it out, leaving a thin, even layer of fibers on the screen. ______ the wet sheet is pressed between felt cloths to remove water and hung up to dry.

• Wangari Maathai (1940-2011) was a Kenyan environmental and political activist.
• In 1977 she founded the Green Belt Movement.
• The movement organized rural women to plant trees, which provided firewood and shade and helped protect the soil from erosion.
• Over the following decades, the movement planted tens of millions of trees in Kenya.
• In 2004, Maathai became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

• Refracting telescopes gather light with a lens; reflecting telescopes use a mirror.
• A lens can be supported only around its edge, so a very large lens sags under its own weight and distorts the image.
• A mirror can be supported across its entire back.
• The largest refracting telescope used for astronomy, at Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin, has a lens 40 inches (about 1 meter) across.
• Today's largest optical telescopes use mirrors more than 8 meters across.

• The Rosetta Stone was found in Egypt in 1799.
• It carries the same decree written in three scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic and ancient Greek.
• Scholars of the time could read ancient Greek but not hieroglyphs.
• Comparing the versions helped Jean-François Champollion decipher hieroglyphs; he announced his breakthrough in 1822.
• The stone is displayed at the British Museum in London.