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

In a memoir about inheriting her family’s farm, the author describes walking the old boundary fence at dusk without speaking to anyone still on the property. Dusk settles over the inherited rows with a hush that feels , as if the land itself were waiting for a decision she had not yet made.

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

During a survey of desert plants, botanist Lena Ortiz noticed that one cactus opened its flowers only after sunset. The nighttime timing reduces water loss, the plant to retain more moisture during the hottest part of the day. Ortiz’s team is now studying whether nearby cactus species follow the same pattern.

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:

• Seaview Theater was restored in 2018.
• Conservators cleaned its original plaster ceiling and repaired missing sections with matching lime plaster.
• Cedar Market was restored in 2022.
• Its badly deteriorated roof trusses were removed and replaced with new timber trusses.
• Both restorations aimed to retain each building’s historic appearance.
• Cedar Market now houses six shops.

The student wants to emphasize a difference in how the two restorations treated original building material. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

The following text is adapted from Rosa Miren’s 2016 novel The High Hall. Theo has joined a community choir.

Theo sang with the community choir, afraid his voice would stand out. Rehearsals took place in a high-ceilinged hall where even a quiet missed pitch seemed to carry. When the conductor asked him to lead a difficult entrance, Theo gave the first note softly. The others joined at once, and the conductor nodded for him to continue. At the next attempt, Theo lifted his head and sang the note loudly enough to fill the hall before anyone else began.

Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?

Scholars generally agree that the explorer Ibn Battuta exaggerated the extent of his travels when he claimed to have visited nearly every Muslim-ruled land of his era. No one disputes, that the journals he dictated late in life remain one of the richest surviving records of fourteenth-century trade routes, cities, and customs across Africa and Asia.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Field biologists had documented that cliff-nesting falcons sometimes desert a ledge when hikers linger nearby during incubation. Hale, a parks planner considering a viewing platform, submitted this question to the biologists: if weekend visitors were allowed to stand only thirty meters from active nests, Hale needed an answer before construction could begin.

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

Municipal emergency offices have often evaluated text-alert systems by the number of seconds between issuing a warning and its arrival on residents’ phones. Communication researcher Anika Sato tested two flood alerts: a compressed message using standard agency abbreviations and a slightly longer message explaining the threatened area and recommended route. The compressed alert arrived an average of eleven seconds sooner. Yet in follow-up simulations, recipients of the longer alert more often identified whether they were in danger and selected the safe evacuation route; this advantage remained even among participants familiar with the abbreviations. Sato concludes that delivery speed, though relevant, is an incomplete measure of an alert system’s effectiveness.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

At Meren, an island settlement, archaeologist Nia Voss found locally made storage jars whose interiors retained pine-resin traces. The jars came from household deposits dated to the settlement’s middle occupation phase. No pine grew on Meren during the occupation, but pollen records show dense pine forests on the nearest mainland. Excavators also recovered fishing weights and other everyday debris from the same layers. Most mainland pottery differs chemically from Meren clay, and among excavated jars, resin appears only in vessels shaped for liquids. Voss cautions that the evidence cannot show whether islanders collected resin themselves or obtained it through exchange. The evidence most strongly suggests that

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Economic historians have long turned to private ledgers to reconstruct how ordinary households managed everyday exchange. Historian Celia Mora studies household account books in which purchases from merchants are recorded precisely but goods exchanged among relatives are often left unpriced. The bound volumes still survive in private family collections and typically list dates, quantities, and the names of counterparties in a regular hand. Mora argues that these omissions mark a conceptual boundary: the households treated reciprocal family exchanges as obligations embedded in relationships, not as market transactions awaiting monetary valuation.

Which quotation from an economic historian most effectively illustrates the claim?

Agronomist Priya Sen tested whether coating tomato seeds with alginate could improve germination when water is scarce without substantially reducing germination when water is plentiful. Alginate forms a thin gel around each seed and can slow moisture loss during the first days after planting. Equal groups of seeds received an alginate coating, a starch coating, or no coating before being planted in dry or moist soil. All trays were kept under the same greenhouse conditions for a fixed interval, and a table reports the percentage that sprouted. Sen concluded that the alginate results supported her prediction.

Which choice best describes data from the table that support Sen’s conclusion?

Fruit trees had knitted their branches into a low tangled canopy that hid the old rows. Visitors called the overgrown orchard neglect; the orchard’s owner privately considered the same wildness a form of , a refusal to force the land into shapes it would not hold.

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

Interest in remote work has grown as more firms have tried to reorganize daily operations. Several studies have found substantial productivity gains among employees who work remotely, yet a number of companies that shifted entirely to remote work recently reported declining output. Priya Nair and colleagues attribute this discrepancy to firms’ tendency—not followed in the recent cases—to pair remote work with deliberate collaboration practices (e.g., scheduling structured check-ins to replace hallway conversations), which has masked the coordination costs of remote work in the productivity data researchers have examined.

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

Blues singers of the 1920s built songs out of repeated lines and bent notes. They were not the first American musicians to work vernacular idiom into composed several nineteenth-century songwriters had already borrowed from spirituals.

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

Newly excavated ceramics from a coastal settlement have led some archaeologists to argue that the region supported year-round habitation rather than seasonal camps. This claim that potters worked through the winter months cannot be confirmed, historian Talia Novak argues, until seasonal firing residues are analyzed.

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 shell midden is a mound containing shells and other materials discarded by people at a settlement.
• Some shell middens remain for thousands of years.
• Growth bands in shells can indicate the season in which the shellfish were gathered.
• The species present can indicate the habitats people used.
• Changes between layers can reveal shifts in food gathering or the nearby shoreline.

The student wants to introduce shell middens and their usefulness to an audience unfamiliar with the topic. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

When evaluating a filter for astronomical images, researchers must distinguish removing noise from erasing faint objects: both operations can make an image’s background appear smoother. A team therefore inserted artificial stars of known brightness into its test images before applying a new filter. The output met the team’s numerical target for background smoothness, a result the researchers nevertheless declined to treat as evidence of success. , many of the faint artificial stars had disappeared along with the noise.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

A report suggests that a new scheduling policy improved service because participating districts reported shorter wait times. Yet districts where waits increased often declined to submit results, indicating that the apparent improvement may be selective reporting.

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

A team of microbiologists investigated how an external coating affects bacterial survival during drying. Samples of the same strain began with equal water content and underwent identical drying conditions. The researchers measured survival in separate samples either after three hours or when water content reached 20% of its initial level. Survival percentages differing by fewer than four percentage points were statistically indistinguishable in this experiment.

The researchers hypothesized that the coating improves survival by delaying dehydration rather than by increasing tolerance of a given degree of dehydration. The comparison that most directly distinguishes this explanation from increased dehydration tolerance is that

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

Some plants release compound R from their roots when usable phosphorus is scarce. In experimental soil, adding R increased the amount of phosphorus dissolved in water, making it available for root absorption. One explanation is that R directly dissolves phosphorus-containing minerals. A soil biologist instead hypothesizes that R increases the rate at which individual soil bacteria convert mineral-bound phosphorus into a soluble form. Because R can also promote bacterial reproduction, merely finding more soluble phosphorus in soil containing R and bacteria would not distinguish an increase in individual bacterial activity from an increase in bacterial numbers.

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

A historian examining a nineteenth-century town’s credit records found that merchants commonly obtained cash by selling lenders one-year promissory notes for less than face value. At maturity, each note required payment of its face value plus stated interest, calculated on that face value. A reform halved the maximum stated interest rate and prohibited supplementary lending fees. However, officials did not classify the difference between a note’s purchase price and its face value as interest or a fee. Lenders charged the maximum stated rate both before and after the reform. Comparing notes with identical face values and repayment periods, all repaid in full, the historian found that lenders’ profit per dollar advanced remained exactly unchanged. This finding could be explained by lenders’

Which choice most logically completes the text?

The following text is from Senaya Orvek’s 2019 poem The Kitchen Map.

My mother marked the ferry with a star. The ferry ceased before I learned to drive, but still her star shines blue beside the crossing. I pencil in the bridge a mile upstream. Along the fold, a thumbprint clouds the orchard where she would stop for pears; the trees are gone. I write the clinic’s name above that field and smooth the paper flat beneath my cup. Tomorrow, taking someone there, I’ll trace the newer road across her faded turning.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

Recent chemical tests of the pigments in a medieval manuscript have led some historians to argue that the book was illuminated locally. Evidence that certain blue dyes were available only in that region cannot stand, conservators reply, unless trade routes are first ruled out.

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:

• Janet Cardiff is a Canadian artist who uses recorded sound as her primary medium.
• She created her work The Forty Part Motet in 2001.
• The Forty Part Motet arranged forty speakers in an oval, each playing one singer’s voice.
• Visitors walking among the speakers could hear individual voices or the full choir.

The student wants to describe The Forty Part Motet to an audience unfamiliar with Janet Cardiff. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

Celia kept her brother’s room as he had left it, though each spring she moved another of her own boxes beneath his bed. The neighbors called this fidelity, and she accepted the word with a modest inclination of her head. The absent ask for so little that one may be generous to them without inconvenience. She had only to open a window occasionally and speak of his return as something the weather might arrange. When his letter finally arrived, announcing that he would come on Thursday, she read it twice. Then she went upstairs and stood before the boxes. For the first time in fifteen years, she found herself wishing that her brother had been more considerate.

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

Recent surveys of Midwestern farms show that native wildflowers planted along crop-field margins can sustain wild bee populations without any need for commercial hives. such findings challenge the idea that only rented honeybee colonies can keep those farms’ fruit crops productive.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Independent calibrations of two neutrino detectors produced background-rate estimates that differed by less than one tenth of one degree of agreement that rules out detector-specific noise as the source of the observed signal.

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

The following text is from Oswin Pellac’s 1896 novel An Evening at Bell Court.

Mrs. Daven received the proposed concert with an enthusiasm qualified by her concern for the drawing-room carpet. The young musicians were delightful, she assured her niece; their cause was admirable. Still, the chairs must be lifted, never dragged, and refreshments confined to the hall. Her niece, who had expected a simple refusal, began counting how many guests the room could hold.

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