SAT Reading and Writing — Module 2 (easier) practice test

After a minor coastal earthquake, seismologists compared P-wave arrival times at three independent stations. The measurements that the tremor originated offshore, and the delays were consistent with a source beyond the continental shelf.

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

Iceland’s Vatnajökull ice caves form tunnels of blue ice beneath a vast glacier. Visitors enter the caves in winter, when the ice is firm enough to walk through. Glaciologist Mira Jónsdóttir and colleagues map these caves because seasonal melt creates new passages each year, offering a rare chance to watch glacial change unfold in real time. Instruments left in the ice record temperature and meltwater flow. By tracking how quickly passages open and collapse, the team hopes to refine models of how large ice sheets respond to warming summers.

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

The painted lanes run beside a busy riverfront corridor used by commuters. City planners praised the new bike lanes for cutting commute times they noted that winter ice still makes some stretches unsafe.

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

Overnight rain flooded the only trail leading to the field station, which sits several kilometers from the nearest paved road. Deep puddles filled every rut, and the low stream crossing stood waist-deep by morning. the morning bird survey was postponed.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Each spring the municipal archive accepts donated books faster than its clerks can catalog them, so weekend volunteers handle the first pass. After the volunteers sort the donated books, responsible for labeling each box by genre so that later researchers can request a volume by subject rather than opening unmarked cartons.

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:

• Researchers at Milbrook University studied how tree canopy cover affects urban temperatures.
• They measured surface temperatures in twelve city blocks with varying levels of tree cover.
• Blocks with more than 40% tree canopy cover averaged temperatures 6°F cooler than blocks with less than 10% cover.
• The study used infrared cameras mounted on drones to record surface temperatures.
• The lead researcher, Dr. Elena Cho, presented the findings at a city planning conference.

The student wants to present the study’s main finding. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

Historians examining a sailor’s diary could not read several entries because the ink had faded. The small volume had been stored for decades, and its paper had grown thin and brown. The historians photographed each page under different wavelengths of light. They then combined the photographs digitally, emphasizing traces of ink that were invisible in ordinary light. This process made many of the missing words legible.

According to the text, how did the historians make the faded diary entries legible?

Night Colors is a 2014 poem by Lila Corvin. In the poem, the speaker sees the northern lights for the first time. A reader claims that the speaker responds to the sight with wonder.

Which quotation from Night Colors most effectively illustrates the claim?

Conservationists at a coastal wildlife preserve have tracked the number of female sea turtles returning to nest on its beaches every two years since 2014. According to the graph, the number of nesting females between 2018 and 2020.

Which choice most effectively uses data from the graph to complete the sentence?

The following text is from Linora Pei’s 2008 short story The Upstairs Window.

Every afternoon, Tomas practiced his trumpet beneath Mrs. Ibarra’s window. Whenever she appeared, he lowered the instrument, certain she had come to complain. Today she called him upstairs. On her table lay a yellowed sheet of music. “My husband used to play this,” she said. “I wondered whether you might learn it. I leave the window open so I can hear you better.” Tomas realized that Mrs. Ibarra

Which choice most logically completes the text?

The following text is from Maren Solberg’s 2021 novel Harbor Light. A narrator watches a gull flying above a harbor.

Catching a sudden gust, the gull banked toward the lighthouse, one wing pointing at the waves and the other at the cloudless sky.

As used in the text, what does the word “banked” most nearly mean?

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

• Biologists measured beak length in reed finches collected in 1970 and 2020.
• Average beak length increased from 11.2 to 13.1 millimeters.
• The birds feed mainly from tube-shaped flowers.
• Average flower-tube depth increased from 12.0 to 14.4 millimeters over the same period.
• The study did not test whether one change caused the other.

The student wants to present the study’s findings about changes in reed-finch beak length and flower-tube depth. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

Before volunteers could examine a collection of nineteenth-century letters, the archive required them to follow three precautions when handling the wearing nitrile gloves, supporting each page on a foam cradle, and using a pencil rather than a pen. These measures reduce the chance that oils, pressure, or stray marks will damage the fragile paper.

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

Ice formed across the shallow harbor overnight after temperatures fell well below freezing, and by dawn a hard sheet stretched from the wooden piers toward open water in every inlet, sealing the shipping lanes that vessels usually followed out of port. crews had already broken a narrow channel, and the morning ferry departed on schedule.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Claudia Goldin’s trailblazing research on women in the labor force, detailed in several landmark papers, to the value of diverse scholarly perspectives.

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

The following text is from Helen Park’s 2015 poem ‘The Door.’

A tin cup rings beside the pump, cedar smoke threads the kitchen screen, beans click softly in a blue bowl, and floorboards answer every step. The kettle lifts its silver breath. All these small sounds gather at the door and say welcome before any voice does.

Which choice best describes the overall structure of the text?

Because the volcanic bedrock beneath the forest is largely , rainwater collects in shallow pools that persist for days after storms, supporting amphibians absent on better-drained ground.

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

In repeated laboratory trials, robotics researchers tested how ramp slope affected the time a small delivery robot needed to finish a fixed indoor route on two surfaces. The robot carried the same payload on every run, started from a marked line, and followed the same indoor path except for the slope of a single ramp. They expected steeper ramps generally to require more time. The results show that

Which choice most effectively uses data from the graph to complete the text?

A narrator is often called unreliable when the narrator’s account conflicts with facts established elsewhere in a story. One literary scholar argues that this definition is too narrow. A narrator may report each event accurately yet dwell on details that excuse one character while omitting details that would favor another. Readers can therefore accept the narrator’s account of what happened while doubting the judgment the account encourages. On this view, unreliability can arise from selective emphasis as well as from factual error.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

Seedlings growing beneath adult trees often receive little nitrogen. Available nitrogen in the upper soil can be scarce where large roots are already dense. Forest ecologists Mireya Santos and Joel Bekele observed that certain soil fungi form continuous networks of hyphae between adult trees and nearby seedlings. The links appeared stable across a growing season. Because nitrogen compounds can move through fungal hyphae, the researchers hypothesize that these networks transport nitrogen from adult trees to shaded seedlings, improving seedling growth. They present the idea as a testable account of how young trees obtain a scarce nutrient.

Which finding, if true, would most directly support the researchers’ hypothesis?

Ecologists hypothesized that inoculating crop seedlings with a soil bacterium, Bacillus aridus, would raise drought tolerance by increasing root water uptake. In a controlled greenhouse trial, inoculated and untreated seedlings of the same variety were grown under a range of drought-stress conditions, with inoculated and untreated seedlings matched within each condition. Average root water uptake rose among inoculated seedlings only in the driest quartile of plots; in wetter plots, inoculated and untreated seedlings did not differ in uptake or survival. These results suggest that

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Architects designing lecture halls can reduce echoes by installing ceiling panels with angled surfaces. Unlike a flat ceiling, which reflects much of a speaker’s voice in one direction, the panels scatter reflections throughout the room. the panels do not eliminate reflected sound; they distribute it more evenly so that a delayed, concentrated reflection is less likely to interfere with speech.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Logbooks from passing vessels mentioned the light on clear nights and in fog alike. That the oldest lighthouse on the cape had guided ships since 1823 was accepted by every determining which lantern design first sat in the tower proved far more contentious.

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

Museum galleries routinely pair displayed objects with brief printed commentary aimed at first-time visitors and families. Studies of museum labels often report that presenting descriptions in two languages improves visitors’ recall, but several controlled experiments have found no such benefit. Cognitive scientist Maëlle Rios observes that the null-result experiments placed translations in a separate panel below each object, whereas the studies reporting gains interleaved the two languages beside each pictured detail. She argues that label arrangement, rather than bilingual wording alone, may determine whether visitors connect terms with what they see.

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

To determine whether an unsigned seventeenth-century play was revised by more than one writer, literary scholar Hana Beltrán compared its spellings with those in dated manuscripts. What the unusual spellings reveal about the order of the revisions, along with the play’s shifting handwriting, currently Beltrán’s claim that a second writer altered the final scene after the rest of the text was copied.

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:

• A damaged fresco fragment from a Tuscan chapel has long been linked to either the workshop of Matteo Bellini or that of his rival, Clara Voss.
• Art historians disagree about which workshop finished the angels’ hands.
• Nora Kim, Victor Hale, and Elise Fontaine used statistical methods to analyze stroke length and pigment ratios in the fragment.
• They concluded that there is a 19.2% probability that Bellini’s workshop painted the angels’ hands, stating that the fragment is “more consistent with Voss’s workshop style.”
• The same team has applied similar methods to disputed panel paintings in Venice and Siena.

The student wants to report the team’s probability finding about the angels’ hands and present the work as statistical attribution research. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

A reconstruction assigns each wooden beam in an ancient hall to a specific calendar year, but the dating method’s calibration interval spans several decades. The timber hall still stands today, and visitors can still see many of the numbered beams overhead. The chronology’s apparent precision is thus the considerable uncertainty in the underlying measurements.

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