SAT Reading and Writing Practice Test: Information and Ideas

Every morning for forty years, Tomas Varga had unlocked his shop at seven, wound the twelve wall clocks in the same order, and laid out his tools on a square of green felt. When his daughter suggested that he sell the business and finally rest, he nodded politely and asked whether she wanted more tea. That evening, after she had gone, he stood in the quiet shop and listened to the clocks ticking slightly out of step. He reached for the oldest one and adjusted its pendulum until it matched the others, as if the room could not be left unfinished.

Along parts of the Pacific coast of North America, sea otters eat large numbers of sea urchins, and sea urchins graze on kelp. When the fur trade reduced otter populations, urchin numbers grew, and many kelp forests were reduced to bare, rocky areas sometimes called urchin barrens. In places where otters have returned, urchins have become less common and kelp has often recovered. Ecologists describe this pattern as a trophic cascade: a change at the top of a food web that spreads down through several levels.

Many songbirds learn their songs by listening to adult birds during a sensitive period early in life. A student researcher hypothesizes that young zebra finches raised without hearing any adult song will still sing as adults but will produce songs that are less organized than those of finches raised with adult tutors.

A student grew radish seedlings for 14 days under white light and under three colors of light: red, blue and green. The table shows the average height of the seedlings in each group.

The student concluded that, among the three colors of light, red light supported the most growth.

In a short story, the narrator describes her grandmother Ines, who ran a small bakery in their neighborhood for decades. The narrator portrays Ines as someone who cared more about generosity than about making a profit.

Some plants produce bitter chemicals in their leaves that discourage insects from eating them. Making these chemicals uses energy that a plant could otherwise spend on growth. A botanist observes that, within one species, plants growing where leaf-eating insects are rare produce much less of the bitter chemical than plants of the same species growing where such insects are common. This pattern suggests that ______

In the early 1800s, news crossed the Atlantic Ocean only as fast as the ships that carried letters and newspapers, a trip that usually took several weeks. Merchants in New York and London therefore made decisions using price information that was already weeks old. After a lasting transatlantic telegraph cable began operating in 1866, the same information could cross the ocean in minutes. This change most likely meant that, after 1866, ______

Maria Sibylla Merian, a German-born naturalist and artist, traveled to the Dutch colony of Suriname in South America in 1699 to study insects. At the time, many Europeans believed that some insects arose spontaneously from mud or rotting matter. Merian's paintings showed caterpillars, pupae, and adult butterflies and moths together with the plants they fed on, recording each stage of the insects' lives. Her book on the insects of Suriname, published in 1705, presented metamorphosis as an orderly cycle tied to particular plants.

A student counted the birds visiting two feeders in her yard over four weeks. Feeder A held sunflower seeds, and Feeder B held a seed mix.

The student claims that Feeder A received more visits than Feeder B in most, but not all, of the weeks she observed.

Archaeologists often date ancient sites with radiocarbon dating, which measures how much carbon-14 remains in material from a once-living thing, such as wood or bone. For wood, the result shows when that part of the tree stopped growing, not when the wood was burned. At one cave site, charcoal from a hearth was dated to about 9,000 years ago. However, the charcoal came from a tree species that can live for many centuries, and people may have burned wood that had been dead for a long time. Therefore, the hearth itself ______

City neighborhoods with few trees tend to be hotter in summer than nearby areas with many trees. Pavement and dark roofs absorb sunlight and release heat, while trees shade the ground and cool the air as water evaporates from their leaves. A city planner hypothesizes that planting street trees throughout a dense neighborhood will lower its summer surface temperatures.