SAT Homework 9.3

As Mexico’s first president from an Indigenous community, Benito Juarez became one of the most ______ figures in his country’s history: among the many significant accomplishments of his long tenure in office (1858–1872), Juarez consolidated the authority of the national government and advanced the rights of Indigenous peoples.

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

• unpredictable

• important

• secretive

• ordinary

Due to their often strange images, highly experimental syntax, and opaque subject matter, many of John Ashbery’s poems can be quite difficult to ______ and thus are the object of heated debate among scholars.

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

• delegate

• compose

• interpret

• renounce

The Cambrian explosion gets its name from the sudden appearance and rapid diversification of animal remains in the fossil record about 541 million years ago, during the Cambrian period. Some scientists argue that this ______ change in the fossil record might be because of a shift in many organisms to body types that were more likely to be preserved.

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

• catastrophic

• elusive

• abrupt

• imminent

During a 2014 archaeological dig in Spain, Vicente Lull and his team uncovered the skeleton of a woman from El Algar, an Early Bronze Age society, buried with valuable objects signaling a high position of power. This finding may persuade researchers who have argued that Bronze Age societies were ruled by men to ______ that women may have also held leadership roles.

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

• waive

• concede

• refute

• require

Within baleen whale species, some individuals develop an accessory spleen—a seemingly functionless formation of splenetic tissue outside the normal spleen. Given the formation’s greater prevalence among whales known to make deeper dives, some researchers hypothesize that its role isn’t ______; rather, the accessory spleen may actively support diving mechanisms.

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

• replicable

• predetermined

• operative

• latent

According to a US tax policy expert, state taxes are ______ other factors when considering an interstate move. Even significant differences in state taxation have almost no effect on most people’s decisions, while differences in employment opportunities, housing availability, and climate are strong influences.

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

• consistent with

• representative of

• overshadowed by

• irrelevant to

The author’s claim about the relationship between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens is ______, as it fails to account for several recent archaeological discoveries. To be convincing, his argument would need to address recent finds of additional hominid fossils, such as the latest Denisovan specimens and Homo longi.

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

• disorienting

• tenuous

• nuanced

• unoriginal

In 1934 physicist Eugene Wigner posited the existence of a crystal consisting entirely of electrons in a honeycomb-like structure. The so-called Wigner crystal remained largely conjecture, however, until Feng Wang and colleagues announced in 2021 that they had captured an image of one. The researchers trapped electrons between two semiconductors and then cooled the apparatus, causing the electrons to settle into a crystalline structure. By inserting an ultrathin sheet of graphene above the crystal, the researchers obtained an impression—the first visual confirmation of the Wigner crystal.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

• Researchers have obtained the most definitive evidence to date of the existence of the Wigner crystal.

• Researchers have identified an innovative new method for working with unusual crystalline structures.

• Graphene is the most important of the components required to capture an image of a Wigner crystal.

• It’s difficult to acquire an image of a Wigner crystal because of the crystal’s honeycomb structure.

When digging for clams, their primary food, sea otters damage the roots of eelgrass plants growing on the seafloor. Near Vancouver Island in Canada, the otter population is large and well established, yet the eelgrass meadows are healthier than those found elsewhere off Canada’s coast. To explain this, conservation scientist Erin Foster and colleagues compared the Vancouver Island meadows to meadows where otters are absent or were reintroduced only recently. Finding that the Vancouver Island meadows have a more diverse gene pool than the others do, Foster hypothesized that damage to eelgrass roots increases the plant’s rate of sexual reproduction; this, in turn, boosts genetic diversity, which benefits the meadow’s health overall.

Which finding, if true, would most directly undermine Foster’s hypothesis?

• At some sites in the study, eelgrass meadows are found near otter populations that are small and have only recently been reintroduced

• At several sites not included in the study, there are large, well-established sea otter populations but no eelgrass meadows.

• At several sites not included in the study, eelgrass meadows’ health correlates negatively with the length of residence and size of otter populations.

• At some sites in the study, the health of plants unrelated to eelgrass correlates negatively with the length of residence and size of otter populations.

Among social animals that care for their young, such as chickens, macaque monkeys, and humans, newborns appear to show an innate attraction to faces and face-like stimuli. Elisabetta Versace and her colleagues used an image of three black dots arranged in the shape of eyes and a nose or mouth to test whether this trait also occurs in Testudo tortoises, which live alone and do not engage in parental care. They found that tortoise hatchlings showed a significant preference for the image, suggesting that ______

Which choice most logically completes the text?

• face-like stimuli are likely perceived as harmless by newborns of social species that practice parental care but as threatening by newborns of solitary species without parental care.

• researchers should not assume that an innate attraction to face-like stimuli is necessarily an adaptation related to social interaction or parental care.

• researchers can assume that the attraction to face-like stimuli that is seen in social species that practice parental care is learned rather than innate.

• newly hatched Testudo tortoises show a stronger preference for face-like stimuli than adult Testudo tortoises do.