SAT Reading and Writing — Module 1 practice test

Travel writer Marin Cole admired the village’s salt air and distant gull cries, but she found the weekend tourists’ chatter against the quiet of its shuttered lanes.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

The first prototype of the water filter removed sediment effectively but allowed dissolved metals to pass through. The redesigned filter, trapped both sediment and dissolved metals by adding a layer of activated carbon.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Last spring the city library in Oakridge renovated a ground-floor room reserved for its youngest visitors after parents asked for a quieter place to browse picture books. The reading room now features low shelves and small tables, and weekend story hours have already begun to fill the redesigned space.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

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

• The Ridgeview Public Library tracks visitor logs each year.
• A visit made by a Ridgeview resident is classified as a local visit.
• All other visits are classified as non-local visits.
• There have been about 8,400 recorded local visits this year.
• There have been over 95,000 recorded non-local visits this year.

The student wants to contrast the number of local visits with the number of non-local visits. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

Later renovations quietly altered several of the older water features on the grounds: a reflecting pool, two and a narrow canal still fed by the spring. The earliest surviving plan of the garden shows a broad pond where the narrow canal appears today.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

To test whether artificial light affects moth navigation, physicist Inés Valera installed lamps beside two forest paths that had similar vegetation and nightly moth activity. The two paths ran along the same wooded slope and were used by walkers during the day. One lamp emitted steady light; the other briefly dimmed whenever a moth approached it. Moths near the dimming lamp resumed straight flight sooner than moths that continued circling the steady lamp. Valera interpreted the difference as evidence that even short intervals of darkness may help moths recover their orientation.

Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?

Glaciologist Priya Sen and her colleagues compared ice-core samples from two neighboring glaciers in Alaska. The cores were drilled to comparable depths and then stored under identical laboratory conditions before chemical analysis began. One glacier’s layers contained unusually high concentrations of volcanic ash from a documented 1800s eruption, while the other’s layers from the same years did not. Each core was dated using seasonal dust layers that accumulate predictably year to year. The team concluded that local wind patterns during the eruption likely carried ash toward only one of the glaciers, a finding that helps explain why neighboring ice records can disagree even when they cover the same period.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

“The Bell in the Square” is a 1912 short story by Adela Rourke. In the story, shopkeeper Mara initially resents the new public clock because its bell interrupts her quiet mornings. Literary critic Jonah Reed claims that by the story’s end, however, Mara regards the clock as a symbol of her connection to the town.

Which quotation from the story most effectively illustrates Reed’s claim?

Paper conservator Luis Mendoza tested whether adding an alkaline buffer could slow the deterioration of archival paper. Acidity that builds up in long-term storage is a common cause of embrittlement in older paper collections. He placed treated and untreated sheets in an accelerated-aging chamber and measured the percentage of each sheet’s initial tensile strength that remained over nine months. The chamber held temperature and humidity constant so that the only intended difference between the sheets was the presence of the buffer. Mendoza concluded that the buffer reduced the rate at which the paper weakened.

Which choice best describes data from the graph that support Mendoza’s conclusion?

Marine archaeologists studying the harbor at Tel Marea found a deposit dated to a single decade containing imported amphora fragments. The broken sherds lay in a waterfront dump mixed with fish bone and net weights. Residue analysis showed that the amphorae had carried pine resin, which was not produced in the surrounding region. The resin was widely used to line jars and to flavor stored liquids. Yet kiln debris from that same decade indicates that local ceramic output was expanding, and locally made storage jars remained common in nearby houses. The archaeologists caution that the imported fragments cannot establish that foreign merchants lived permanently at the harbor.

Which statement about Tel Marea is most strongly supported by the text?

Historians of early printing note that press operators did not simply discard manuscript habits overnight; they established conventions of page layout to suit a growing commercial market for cheaper, more uniform books.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

Larvae of a certain desert beetle can remain inactive for years while waiting for rain. That the larvae survive such long dry periods surprising to biologists who study insects in less arid environments.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

A computer model trained to identify bird species from recordings performed well on a library of clear, professionally collected calls. On those clean files, the model matched expert labels for most of the species in the set. However, the training library contained few recordings with overlapping voices, wind, or traffic noise. Because volunteers often record birds under exactly those conditions, the researchers cautioned that the model’s accuracy in the library may overstate its performance on community-submitted audio.

Which choice best describes the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?

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

• Scientist Hana Ko studied 120 adults who were keeping sleep diaries.
• Participants were randomly assigned to receive either adaptive reminders after missed entries or one fixed reminder each evening.
• After three weeks, the adaptive-reminder group had completed 88 percent of its diary entries.
• The fixed-reminder group had completed 74 percent.
• Self-reported sleep quality did not differ between the groups.
• Ko concluded that adaptive reminders may improve diary completion but did not claim that they improve sleep.

The student wants to emphasize a difference in completion rates between the two reminder groups. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

An analysis of clay cooking pots from a Bronze Age settlement found traces of millet in vessels from every household excavated. This widespread pattern suggests that millet was a common food. The study cannot establish how frequently residents ate the grain, since chemical residues may persist after only occasional use. this limitation does not undermine a narrower conclusion: millet was known across the settlement rather than restricted to elite kitchens.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

City planners now track nighttime temperatures when they design summer cooling strategies. The term describes the tendency of densely built neighborhoods to remain warmer than nearby rural areas after sunset.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

Writing for a scholarly journal, translator Adeel Rahman urges colleagues to be when choosing English substitutes for culturally specific kinship terms in Yoruba verse: a casual paraphrase can flatten social nuance that the poem depends on. The short essay cites several recent English translations and asks how those versions handle address, rank, and obligation.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

Periodic dimming of the star KX-41 was initially attributed either to a single collision between rocky bodies or to a stream of icy fragments. The two accounts were usually presented as mutually exclusive explanations for the same fading events. Astronomer Celeste Ramires found large mineral grains associated with collisions, but she also detected brief gas releases spaced at regular orbital intervals, as expected from multiple volatile-rich fragments. Both signals were faint and noisy across individual orbits. A model combining repeated collisions among such fragments reproduced both the dust composition and the timing of the dimming. Ramires therefore proposes that the two explanations need not be alternatives: collisions within an orbiting fragment stream may generate the obscuring dust.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

Behavioral scientists Nila Venn and Omar Ketu studied remote employees who use software that automatically rearranges their daily schedules. The calendar program shifts meetings and deadlines when new tasks arrive, often several times in a single day. Participants worked from home in a range of occupations and completed weekly logs of planned and finished work. The scientists claim that frequent automated rescheduling may reduce task completion indirectly: repeated changes may weaken employees’ sense of control over their work, and that diminished sense of control may in turn reduce their persistence.

Which finding, if true, would most directly support the scientists’ claim?

Every silverleaf plant that flowered in a greenhouse experiment had first experienced at least ten cold nights. The greenhouse kept a steady daytime temperature and a fixed daily watering schedule. Yet many plants given ten or more cold nights did not flower, especially those grown in shallow pots. Researchers scored each plant weekly for buds and open blooms. The results support the conclusion that, under the tested conditions,

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Linguist Anika Shah traced the phrase “civic lab,” which refers to a community-based site for testing public programs, in two collections of writing. One collection gathered daily news articles from a range of outlets; the other gathered personal blogs written for a general audience. Shah argued that although use of the phrase rose in both collections after 2010, its later growth was substantially stronger in the less formal collection of personal blogs. Frequency was standardized as occurrences per million words so that the two collections could be compared despite large differences in total length. The table supports Shah’s argument because

Which choice most effectively uses data from the table to complete the statement?

Dating medieval manuscripts precisely has always been difficult when documentary records are incomplete. Radiocarbon assays of two disputed medieval manuscripts produced overlapping date ranges that neither confirm nor rule out a shared workshop. Paleographers had long treated the hands as products of rival scriptoria on stylistic grounds alone. several scholars now treat single-workshop authorship as a live hypothesis and reexamine watermark evidence that earlier catalogs dismissed as inconclusive.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

For decades, researchers had relied mainly on pottery styles to date early settlements along the lakeshore. Archaeologists analyzing charcoal fragments from a lakeside settlement dated the earliest permanent dwellings to roughly 7,200 years ago, earlier than many regional models had result that has prompted a reassessment of when farming communities first stabilized along that shoreline.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

The unruly creatures painted in the margins of medieval manuscripts are often interpreted as challenges to the authority represented by the solemn texts they surround. Their incongruity certainly interrupts a reader’s encounter with those texts. Yet a critic of this interpretation observes that the same institutions that commissioned the solemn texts frequently paid for the mischievous marginal images. Institutional sponsorship does not make the images humorless or eliminate their disruptive effect; it does complicate the assumption that disruption necessarily expresses opposition. The critic proposes that the margins sometimes provided a licensed interval of disorder through which readers could return to the central text with its authority intact. On this account, the familiar interpretation identifies a real visual tension but assigns that tension a purpose it need not have served.

Which choice best describes the overall structure of the text?

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

• Artist Mara Venn’s installations Passage and Interval both feature polished aluminum panels.
• In Passage, visitors can slide panels along ceiling tracks, changing the panels’ positions and the routes through the installation.
• After visitors leave each day, an attendant returns Passage’s panels to their opening positions.
• In Interval, the panels remain fixed to the floor throughout the day; visitors cannot reposition them.
• As visitors walk through Interval, their changing viewpoints make the panels appear to overlap differently.
• Photographs taken from the same marked location before opening and after the attendant’s work show matching panel arrangements within each installation.

The student wants to explain why the matching photographs do not establish that the two installations’ panel positions were equally stable during visiting hours. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

New sediment cores from a high-altitude lake have led some geologists to argue that alpine glaciers in the region retreated earlier than once thought. This claim that ice cover vanished abruptly around 8,000 years ago cannot stand, researchers Ana Ruiz and Ben Okada reply, unless competing explanations for the sediment layers are first excluded.

Which choice completes the text so that it conforms to the conventions of Standard English?

An oral account recorded in the Tavi community describes territorial boundaries that closely match those on an early colonial survey. Because the account also names landmarks omitted from that survey, anthropologist Lale Chen argues that the correspondence is the hypothesis that the oral geography predates the colonial map.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?