SAT Reading and Writing Practice Test: Standard English Conventions

Researchers at a maritime museum have spent the past year cataloging items donated by local families. The collection of handwritten letters that the museum acquired last spring ______ new details about the daily lives of lighthouse keepers in the nineteenth century.

The ancient city of Petra, in present-day Jordan, was carved directly into rose-colored sandstone cliffs. Though Petra is now one of the most visited sites in the region, ______ rock-cut tombs and temples were largely unknown to Europeans until the Swiss traveler Johann Ludwig Burckhardt reached the city in 1812.

Before 1869, a journey from the East Coast of the United States to California could take months by wagon or by ship. The first transcontinental railroad was completed that ______ passengers could then make the same trip in about a week.

The expedition set out from its high camp shortly after midnight, hoping to reach the summit before the afternoon storms rolled in. By the time the team finally stood on the top, the climbers ______ for nearly fourteen hours without a real rest.

Rock layers exposed in a canyon wall can preserve millions of years of environmental history. Having studied the layers along one canyon for three summers, ______

Visitors to the city's botanical garden can explore three very different habitats ______ a tropical rainforest dome, a desert greenhouse, and an outdoor wetland trail. A single ticket covers all three areas, and guided tours leave from the main entrance every hour.

In the early 1900s, two sisters kept daily weather records on their family's farm for more than forty years. Both ______ notebooks, filled with temperatures, rainfall totals and notes on the first frost of each fall, were later donated to the county historical society.

The museum's new gallery is devoted to the history of music. Among the oldest objects on display ______ a flute carved from the wing bone of a large bird, which visitors can hear played in a recording at the end of the gallery.

Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, which was first published in ______ won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year. The book is set after the Civil War and follows a woman who escaped from slavery.

Honeybees share information about food through movement. The waggle dance, which tells other bees in the hive the direction and distance of a food source, ______ first decoded by the Austrian scientist Karl von Frisch, who later shared a Nobel Prize for his work on animal behavior.

Each spring, the town's parks committee honors one resident for volunteer service. This year's award will go to the volunteer ______ the committee believes has done the most to restore the riverside trail, which had been closed for years after a flood.