Random SAT questions

Whether Carmen Lomas Garza is creating small paintings and illustrations or large public artworks—such as Baile, a copper cutout of traditional Mexican dance in the San Francisco International Airport—she is ______blank direct experience, drawing from memories of her childhood in Texas or details of her current surroundings in California.

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

• complimented by

• uncertain about

• unbothered by

• • inspired by

Disproving the common misconception of Native art as ______blank, the painters whose work appears in the collection at the National Museum of the American Indian employ a range of styles. There are artists working in the traditional arts of their specific tribal communities, artists working in European modernist or American abstract expressionist art traditions, and artists blending various traditions into something wholly new.
Which choice completes the text with the most logical and precise word or phrase?

• uncontroversial

• individualistic

• theoretical

• homogeneous

The following text is from Betty Smith’s 1943 novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Francie, a young girl, visits the library often.

Francie thought that all the books in the world were in that library and she had a plan about reading all the books in the world. She was reading a book a day in alphabetical order and not skipping the dry ones. She remembered that the first author had been Abbott. She had been reading a book a day for a long time now and she was still in the B’s. Already she had read about bees and buffaloes, Bermuda vacations and Byzantine architecture. For all her enthusiasm, she had to admit that some of the B’s had been hard going. But Francie was a reader.

Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?

• To illustrate Francie’s enjoyment of an unusual topic

• To explain why Francie prefers reading over other activities

• To portray Francie’s determination to meet a goal

• To describe a book that Francie greatly admires

The people of medieval Europe have traditionally been seen as uninterested in cleanliness and hygiene, but modern research has shown that this is largely a myth. According to historian Eleanor Janega, most medieval towns in Europe had at least one public bathhouse, which often offered both full-immersion baths and—more affordably—steam baths. While such amenities were available mainly to town dwellers, regular bathing in rivers and streams or daily sponge baths at home were common practices throughout medieval Europe.

Which choice best describes the function of the underlined portion?

• It asserts that in medieval Europe steam baths were more popular in rural areas than in urban ones.

• It describes a limitation of earlier historians’ studies of medieval European bathing habits.

• It concedes that not all people in medieval Europe had access to public bathhouses.

• It explains why Janega decided to study the popularity of public bathhouses in medieval Europe.

Text 1

An excavation in Chiquihuite Cave in central Mexico has upended the belief that approximately 13,000 years ago, a group known as the Clovis people were the first human inhabitants of North America. More than 200 crude stone tools were found embedded in a layer of earth that is up to 33,150 years old, revealing that humans occupied the cave thousands of years before the Clovis people reached the continent.

 

Text 2

The objects uncovered in Chiquihuite Cave are intriguing, but it is premature to characterize them as tools. The stone pieces are so roughly shaped that they may have simply fractured from rocks during natural geological activity in the cave. Moreover, their unearthing has thus far not been accompanied by discoveries of other signs of human activity or even traces of human DNA from surfaces.

 

Based on the texts, how would the author of Text 2 most likely respond to the underlined claim in Text 1?

• By suggesting that it draws a plausible connection between two groups of people but will need to be confirmed with further study

• By asserting that it rests on an assumption about the stone pieces that is not sufficiently supported by available evidence

• By acknowledging that it will most likely be proved correct when the stone pieces undergo more detailed analysis

• By pointing out that it fails to account for evidence that the Clovis people were active on the continent as early as is commonly thought

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is an 1892 short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In the story, the narrator expresses mixed feelings about her surroundings: ______

Which quotation from “The Yellow Wallpaper” most effectively illustrates the claim?

• “This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then.”

• “By moonlight—the moon shines in all night when there is a moon—I wouldn’t know it was the same paper.”

• “I’m really getting quite fond of the big room, all but that horrid [wall]paper.”

• “The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering, unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.”

As media consumption has become increasingly multiplatform and socially mediated, active news acquisition has diminished in favor of an attitude known as “news finds me” (NFM), in which people passively rely on their social networks and ambient media environments for information about current events. Homero Gil de Zúñiga and Trevor Diehl examined data on a representative group of adults in the United States to determine participants’ strength of NFM attitude, political knowledge, and political interest. Although no major election took place sufficiently near the study for Gil de Zúñiga and Diehl to identify causality between NFM and voting behavior, they did posit that NFM may reduce voting probability through an indirect effect.

Which finding, if true, would most directly support the idea advanced by Gil de Zúñiga and Diehl?

• NFM attitude tends to increase in strength as major elections approach, and people are significantly more likely to vote in major elections than in minor elections.

• NFM attitude has a strong negative effect on political knowledge and interest, and there is known to be a strong positive correlation between political knowledge and interest and the likelihood of voting.

• Political interest is known to have a strong positive effect on likelihood of voting but shows only a weak positive effect on political knowledge, and NFM attitude shows little correlation with either political knowledge or political interest.

• The likelihood of voting increases as political knowledge increases, and the relationship between NFM attitude and political knowledge tends to strengthen as the size of people’s social networks increases.

In 2016 biological anthropologist Heather F. Smith and her team investigated the evolution of the appendix, an intestinal organ that is present in some mammals, including humans, but is generally thought to have no function. Studying 533 mammal species, the team found that the appendix has emerged independently across multiple lineages in separate instances and, significantly, hasn’t disappeared after emerging in specific lineages. Moreover, the team determined that species with the organ tend to have higher concentrations of lymphoid tissue, which supports immune responses, in the cecum, the organ the appendix is attached to. Therefore, the team hypothesized that the appendix likely ______

Which choice most logically completes the text?

• was once present in many nonmammal species but has since disappeared from those lineages.

• has been preserved in certain mammal species because it benefits their immune systems.

• will emerge in a greater number of mammal species because it may serve a necessary function in the immune system.

• produced higher concentrations of lymphoid tissue in mammals in the past than it does currently.

Technologies such as microphones and inkjet printers are made using piezoelectric materials, which generate an internal electric field when pressure is applied to them. The toxic nature of some of these materials recently led a team from the University of Sheffield to investigate how ______

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

• could their use be better regulated?

• their use could be better regulated.

• their use could be better regulated?

• could their use be better regulated.

Fans of the film Moana (2016) may not know that the deep and humorous voice behind the ______blankbelongs to comedian, actor, and musician Jemaine Clement. The versatile performer has appeared in everything from television commercials to action movies, but voice acting, specifically, has become a notable part of his career.

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

• character Tamatoa the crab

• character Tamatoa the crab,

• character: Tamatoa the crab,

• character, Tamatoa the crab