SAT Pastpaper with Solutions

Whether the reign of a Trench monarch such as Louis VI or Louis Philippe I was considered historically significant or, conversely, relatively _____ , its trajectory was shaped by questions of legitimacy and therefore cannot be understood without a corollary understanding of the factors that allowed the monarch to assert a claim to the throne successfully.

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

Barring major archaeological discoveries, we are unlikely to ever have ____ account of ancient Egypt under the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, as much of the evidence of her reign was deliberately destroyed by her successors.

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

The Lascaux Cave paintings ——detailed paintings of animals found in what is now France and dating from around 17,000 years ago——are sometimes said to be emotionally powerful despite their age, but in fact the paintings are____ precisely because of their age. It is the link of shared humanity with the artists across so many centuries that gives the Lascaux Cave paintings such resonance.

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

Rome has high pedestrian traffic, but simply replicating a feature of Rome associated with walkability --- e.g., its high number of street crossings---may be insufficient to induce increased walking in other cities. As urbanist Mariela Alfonzo argues, our understanding of individuals' decision making about whether to walk is insufficiently robust: some studies  emphasize the role of demographic characteristics, others the role of sidewalk width, and so on, but walking decisions are made in complex contexts in which multiple conditions and needs inform individuals' choices.

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

Text 1

Scholarship today overrepresents formal experimentation, such as H.D.'s use of minimalistic, image-based structures, well beyond the degree to which it actually influenced US poetry during the modernist period (roughly 1900 1945). Meanwhile, the work of Dorothy Parker, who relied on conventional poetic forms associated with previous literary periods, attracts woefully little attention from scholars of modernism.

Text 2

Distant reading, or computer-assisted quantitative analysis of massive collections of digitized texts, can reveal stylistic elements that have heretofore escaped notice, despite being shared by numerous texts from the modernist period. For too long, scholars have focused on experimental versus conventional poetic forms, inhibiting inquiry into other points of stylistic correspondence among poems that would enrich our understanding of the modernist canon.

Based on the texts, how would the author of Text 2 most likely regard the emphasis that Text 1 places on poetic form during the modernist period?

In her 1998 book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Angela Y. Davis bases
her analysis in part on recordings of songs sung in the 1920s by Gertrude "Ma" Rainey and Bessie Smith. Davis focuses on how Rainey and Smith improvised the lyrics --- replacing the original lines with mischievous jokes and wordplay. Davis's work was particularly labor intensive because in order to transcribe, or write down, the lyrics as Rainey and Smith sang them, Davis had to listen repeatedly to the vinyl recordings, which weren't very clear.

What does the text most strongly suggest about the songs sung by Rainey and Smith?

The following text is from Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1830 short story "Sir William Phips." Few of the personages of past times (except such as have gained renown in fireside legends as well as in written history) are anything
but mere names to their successors. They seldom stand up in our Imaginations like men. The knowledge, communicated by the historian and biographer, is analogous to that which we acquire of a country by the map,---minute, perhaps, and accurate, and available for all necessary purposes, but cold and naked, and wholly destitute of the mimic charm produced by landscape painting.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

Rafael Nunez and colleagues studied how members of the Yupno, an Indigenous group in Papua New Guinea, conceptualize time. The researchers recorded Yupno speakers explaining certain temporal words and phrases, such as kalip bishap, a past-oriented expression that translates to "past times," and coded each speaker's manual gestures. Previous research has found a tendency in many cultures to make temporal distinctions using spatial concepts and gestures, particularly along egocentric axes (i.e.,relative to the orientation of the speaker): for instance, Hebrew speakers often refer to the right/left axis to describe events in time. In an anthropology paper, a student claims that the tendency toward ego-based conceptualizations of time is universal.

Which finding, if true, would most directly weaken the student's claim?

Many films in a language other than English grow to be financially successful over the course of their time in movie theaters in the United States, but some become immediate successes in their opening weekends. A journalist claims that a film's reception can greatly influence its longterm success. Indications that the film is of high quality, such as an Oscar nomination, can dramatically boost public interest in the film and thus its overall earnings, even with a relatively modest opening weekend performance: for example, `_`

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

Neurobiologists Laura Cuaya, Raül Hernândez-Pérez, and colleagues investigated the language detection abilities of eighteen dogs. The researchers monitored the brain activity of Barack (a golden retriever), Mini (a mixed breed), and other dogs while the animals listened to three recordings: one of The Little Prince being read in Spanish, the second in Hungarian, and a third made up of short, randomly selected fragments of the first two, scrambled so that they didn't resemble human speech. Each dog was familiar with either Spanish or Hungarian, but not both. The team concluded that differences in dogs' anatomical features may affect their ability to distinguish speech from nonspeech.

Which finding from the study, if true, would most directly support the team's conclusion?

Permafrost in Alaska has been degrading, potentially enabling increased carbon dioxide (C02) absorption through greater productivity of bristle-pointed iris (Iris setoso) plants and other vegetation, but also potentially enabling increased C02 output through greater heterotrophic respiration (C02 generated by the activity of soil microorganisms). Hydrologist Yonghong Yi and her colleagues modeled seasonal changes in net C02 in Alaska in a landscape grid of 1 square kilometer (km2) cells and again in a grid of 10 km2 cells, which are finer resolutions than most models of net C02 have achieved. The researchers concluded that variations in the landscape affect net C02 in ways that most models are too coarse to capture.

Which finding from the researchers' study, if true, would most directly support the researchers' conclusion?

Indigenous songs can be repositories of ecological information, from Karen (hta) Hin Lad Nai songs about bees to O'odham songs about desert plants. Kwakwaka'wakw song keeper Kwaxsistalla Wathl'thla aided research by ethnobiologist Dana Lepofsky et al. by contributing songs that reference creating terraced intertidal gardens to foster the healthy development of clams, a staple in the Kwakwaka'wakw people's diet. Such structures date as far back as 3,500 years ago. Intriguingly, analysis of local paleoecological marine bivalve records has revealed significant increases in clam size and productivity as clam garden practices became more prevalent and harvesting pressure increased --- a finding that bolsters the notion that `_`

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Saeed M.Z.A. Tarabieh conducted a study of consumer attitudes toward Jordanian food and beverage companies and found that for consumers who value environmental conservation, their likelihood of purchasing a product decreased when their perception of the product's risk of causing environmental harm increased. Subsequently, other researchers conducted a study of various demographic groups in Greece, investigating
participants' intentions to purchase a new piece of furniture, and found that, on average, suburban residents had the highest perception among all the demographic groups in the study of the environmental risks of the piece of
furniture. Assuming that the results of Tarabieh's study are broadly applicable, this finding suggests that ____

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Quasars --- such as CTA 102, located in the Pegasus constellation --- are extremely luminous galactic nuclei powered by supermassive black holes, some of which are known to have developed within the first billion years of the formation of the universe. Based on simulations they conducted, astrophysicists Daniel Whalen, Muhammad Latif, and colleagues concluded that these early quasars developed partly as a result of rare
convergences of gases in space without the need for ultraviolet backgrounds or other extreme and implausible environmental conditions that models of the early universe have included to account for the presence of these quasars. If this conclusion is correct, it suggests that `_`

Which choice most logically completes the text?

The present-day city of Engels, Russia, was for years the capital of the Volga Germ an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, one of many nominally autonomous republics within the Soviet Union. Like `_` peer autonomous Soviet socialist republics, the Volga German Republic was established along ethnolinguistic lines: most of the republic's residents spoke German.

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

Tonga's constitution, enacted in 1875, contains just one of the six constitutional features that enhance judicial independence, as identified by legal scholars James Melton and Tom Ginsburg. After 1985, such de jure judicial independence became more prevalent, as exemplified in Swaziland's constitution, enacted in 2005 and `_` five of these features.

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

The Limon technique, developed by Mexican-born dancer and choreographer Jose Limon, is known for its emphasis on breath control and its interplay of weight and `_` dancers may explore, for example, the moment of mid-air suspension at the top of a jump.

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

Chondrites are stony meteorites that are undifferentiated ---that is, their contents have not melted and separated into distinct layers. They are hardly__many chondrites experience aqueous alteration as a result of exposure to fluids, as well as fracturing, veining, and localized melting due to collisions with other objects.

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

Named for the year in which it was detected by Japanese astronomers, SN 2018zd was a supernova (the explosion of a massive `_` in the constellation Camelopardalis, 70 million light-years from Earth, the transient yet powerful blast propelled particles and debris into space at extremely high speeds.

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

Not all plants benefit equally or from the same kind of           sweet gum and cucumber, for example, benefit from endomycorrhizal associations; many tree species, such as oak and pine, benefit from ectomycorrhizal associations; and plants in the Ericaceae family, such as lingonberry, don't benefit from mycorrhizae at all.

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

Those who looked up at the right time on July 9, 1926, would have witnessed an annular solar eclipse, during which the Moon blocks most of the Sun and causes it to look like a ring of light. ___________ stargazers on December 24, 1927, would have seen a partial solar eclipse, during which the Moon only blocks a portion of the Sun and causes it to look like a crescent.

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

With many elements, like selenium, scientists were able to isolate a relatively pure sample of the substance shortly after discovering its existence --- but this wasn't the case with all elements.            the isolation process took years. The element radon, for instance, was discovered in 1899 but not isolated until 1908.

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

In Tino Villanueva's 2016 poem "Field of Moving Colors Layered," the poet contemplates a painting that has inspired him: Alberto Valdés's 1965 work Untitled. The painting, which features overlapping geometric shapes, fuels the poem's exploration of temporality and identity. `____`  in responding to Valdés's artwork, Villanueva's poem reflects on the relationship between poetry and other art forms.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

• Grimanesa Amoros is a Peruvian American artist.
• She is well known for her large-scale LED light sculptures.
• Hedera debuted in 2018 in the Prospect Park Bandshell in Brooklyn, New York.
• It is made of entangled red and white LED tubes.
• It occupies 100,000 cubic feet of space.

Which choice most effectively uses information from the given sentences to emphasize when and where Hedera debuted?

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

• Thailand's annual Songkran Water Festival is held each April.

• It marks Songkran, the traditional Thai New Year.

• People splash and spray each other for fun at the festival's community-wide water fights.

• In Bangkok, thousands gather along Silom Road for the city's largest water fight.

• In Chiang Mai, thousands gather at a historical monument called the Tha Phae Gate for the city's largest water fight.

The student wants to emphasize a similarity in how people in Bangkok and Chiang Mai celebrate Songkran. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

• In a 2005 study, Janecek and Leps tested the effect of plant litter on seedling emergence in a grassland setting.

• Plant litter includes dead leaves and other plant material.

• The test site was a flooded grassland in the Czech Republic.

• It was in a temperate midlatitude climate.

•The researchers found that in these environmental conditions the presence of plant litter had a negative effect on seedling emergence.

Which choice most effectively uses information from the given sentences to specify the test site's climate?