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

The historian argues that the diaries, though often cited as proof of widespread dissent in the town, are ______ evidence at best: their authors were few, were related to one another by marriage, and rarely described events they had witnessed themselves.

Although the composer's late works were initially dismissed as ______, later listeners came to recognize that their apparent disorder concealed a rigorous design: each seemingly random passage reworks a theme introduced in the opening measures.

Ecologists had long assumed that two hummingbird species in the valley competed for the same flowers throughout the year, but field observations ______ that assumption: the species fed at the same plants only during the few weeks each spring when other nectar sources were scarce.

In her review, the critic praises the photographs for their power to arrest the viewer: ordinary scenes of laundry lines and bus shelters become, in the photographer's framing, strange enough to make a passerby stop and look twice.

Because the commission's final report on the proposed dam was so ______, both the project's supporters and its opponents were able to quote passages from it as support for their own positions.

When it was discovered in 1930, Pluto was classified as the ninth planet. Beginning in the 1990s, however, astronomers found many other icy bodies orbiting beyond Neptune, and in 2005 they found one, later named Eris, that is roughly the size of Pluto. If Pluto was a planet, it seemed that Eris had to be one too, and perhaps dozens of other objects as well. In 2006 the International Astronomical Union adopted a definition requiring a planet to have cleared the region around its orbit of other objects, and Pluto, which shares its region with many bodies, was reclassified as a dwarf planet.

Ask people to picture a desert and most will describe sand dunes under a blazing sun. Scientists, though, classify deserts by how little precipitation they receive, not by how hot they are. By that standard, much of Antarctica, where snow rarely falls and almost never melts, is a desert, and in fact it is the largest one on Earth.

Text 1

The arrival of the printing press in fifteenth-century Europe is often credited with fixing the spelling of written languages. Once thousands of identical copies of a book could be produced, the argument goes, readers everywhere encountered the same spellings, and the variation of the manuscript era quickly disappeared.

Text 2

Printed books from the first century after Gutenberg show that spelling remained remarkably unstable. Early printers sometimes added or dropped letters in a word simply to fill out a line of type evenly, and different print shops followed their own habits. In English, widely accepted spellings settled only gradually, over roughly the next two centuries, helped along by influential dictionaries.

City planners have often treated street trees as decoration, something to add once the roads and sidewalks are finished. But trees shade pavement that would otherwise absorb sunlight all afternoon, and as water evaporates from their leaves, they cool the air around them. On a summer afternoon a street lined with large trees can be noticeably cooler than an unshaded street nearby. The effect depends heavily on how much of the street the canopy covers, which is why a few scattered saplings provide little relief.

A honeybee that has found a good source of food returns to the hive and performs a "waggle dance" on the vertical surface of the honeycomb. During the dance, the bee repeatedly runs in a straight line while shaking its body from side to side. The angle of this run relative to straight up on the comb indicates the direction of the food relative to the direction of the sun, and the length of time the bee spends on each waggle run indicates how far away the food is.

On some small Caribbean islands, a species of anole lizard lives alongside predatory birds, while on other nearby islands the birds are absent. A biologist hypothesizes that anoles on islands with these predators have adjusted their behavior to reduce their risk, specifically by spending more of their time in dense vegetation, where birds have difficulty spotting and reaching them.

In a novel, the narrator describes her grandfather, a retired train conductor, as a man whose days are still ruled by timetables long after he has stopped working.

A researcher studied household water use in four cities after each adopted water-saving rules. She noted that the city with the largest decrease in liters was not the city with the largest percent decrease: ______

Many lichens are highly sensitive to sulfur dioxide, an air pollutant released when fuels containing sulfur are burned. In 1970, surveys near an old factory in an industrial city found very few lichen species, far fewer than at rural sites outside the city. Records show that the factory switched to a low-sulfur fuel in 1985, and by 2020, surveys near the factory found nearly as many lichen species as at the rural sites. Taken together, these observations suggest that ______

Climate researchers use old ships' logbooks to reconstruct past weather, because crews often recorded wind and sea conditions every day. Logbooks from naval vessels were usually kept on a strict schedule, but those from merchant ships vary: some crews made detailed daily entries, while others skipped days or wrote only when something unusual happened. A researcher who wants to estimate how often storms struck a region where only merchant ships sailed should therefore ______

The collection of letters, sketches and unfinished manuscripts that the poet's family donated to the university ______ scholars a rare view of her working methods.

The iron bridge over the river was originally designed to carry freight ______ however, it has served only pedestrians and cyclists since the rail line closed.

Architect Julia ______ the first woman licensed to practice architecture in California, designed more than 700 buildings during her career, among them the hilltop estate now known as Hearst Castle.

The museum closed for renovation in 2016. By the time it reopened in 2019, its curators ______ more than 3,000 objects that had sat uncatalogued in the storage rooms for decades.

The tide pools along the rocky coast support a surprising variety of life. In ______ shallow, sunlit water, anemones, sea stars and small fish survive the hours between high tides.

Trained as a mathematician before she turned to music, ______

As a comet approaches the Sun, the solar wind and the pressure of sunlight push gas and dust away from it, forming tails that point away from the Sun. ______ a comet that is moving back out of the inner solar system travels tail first.

On early high-wheel bicycles, the pedals were attached directly to the front wheel, so the larger the wheel, the farther the bicycle traveled with each turn of the pedals; some front wheels were taller than the riders. ______ the chain-driven "safety bicycle" of the 1880s could have two wheels of equal, modest size, since its gears, not the size of a wheel, determined how far one turn of the pedals carried the rider.

The novelist rarely revised her drafts. She wrote slowly, settling each sentence before she moved on to the next, and her first versions often went to the printer almost unchanged. Her friend the poet, ______ worked quickly and then produced dozens of versions of a single poem before he was satisfied.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• Wangari Maathai was born in Kenya in 1940.
• In 1971 she became the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate.
• In 1977 she founded the Green Belt Movement.
• The Green Belt Movement organizes communities, mainly women, to plant trees.
• In 2004 Maathai became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990.
• Hubble observes mainly visible and ultraviolet light, along with some near-infrared light.
• The James Webb Space Telescope was launched in December 2021.
• Webb observes mainly infrared light.
• Infrared light can pass through clouds of dust that block visible light.

While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes:

• The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen.
• It opened in 2008.
• It stores duplicate seed samples sent by genebanks around the world.
• The samples serve as backups in case a genebank's own collection is lost.
• The vault is built into a mountain, where permafrost helps keep it cold.