SAT Pastpaper with Solutions

The National Heritage Fellowship was created to ____________ exceptional folk and traditional artists in the United States. One artist who received the fellowship, the taiko drummer Seiichi Tanaka, was chosen for his lifetime contributions to the arts.

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

Broods of periodical cicadas (inch-long winged insects) emerge for six weeks in late spring on a cycle of either 13 or 17 years. In 2024, the emergences of the Great Southern Brood (on a 13-year cycle) and the Northern Illinois Brood (on a 17-year cycle) coincided in the Midwest and Southeast United States, ___________ that happens only once every 221 years. Sixteen states were covered with a trillion cicadas.

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

Portoviejo, Ecuador, was named a City of Gastronomy by UNESCO in 2019, a title that _______ that Portoviejo has a unique and vibrant food culture worthy of celebration.

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

The following text is from Charles Chesnutt's 1905 novel The Colonel's Dream. Mr. French and Mr. Kirby work together.

 

Mr. French, the senior partner, who sat opposite Kirby, was an older man—a safe guess would have placed him somewhere in the debatable ground between forty and fifty; of a good height, as could be seen even from the seated figure, the upper part of which was held erect with the unconscious ease which one associates with military training.

 

As used in the text, what does the word "good" most nearly mean?

How bright is the night sky above your home compared to truly dark wilderness areas? This is the question investigated by citizen scientists participating in the Globe at Night project. Rather than using simply "darkness," trained observers recognize that night skies exist on a spectrum of brightness. By counting visible stars within specific constellations or measuring sky glow with specialized meters, participants quantify what was once just a subjective experience. These data help researchers track light pollution trends and their effects on wildlife and human health.

According to the text, what is one effect that the Globe at Night project has for participants?

Curious about how people visually perceive objects in their dreams, Stephen LaBerge and team recruited lucid dreamers—people aware that they're dreaming as it's happening—for a research study. These participants were reliably able to signal when they had entered a dream state, the team then observed participants' eye movements as they slept. The smoothness with which participants' eyes tracked objects in their dreams closely matched how sighted people who are awake visually track objects around them, suggesting to the team that the brain perceives dream objects as the product of something other than pure imagination.

 

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

Text 1

Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century has a more rigorous structure than its sequel, Capital and Ideology. While the first book's chapters all contribute to bolstering a clear, coherent argument about income inequality, the second book's digressions on subjects such as an analysis of Hayao Miyazaki's film The Wind Rises do not just make the book tedious but also muddy its reasoning.

 

 

Text 2

Capital and Ideology has different aims than Piketty's earlier books. It should be judged not just in the context of Piketty's previous work but placed next to books like William T. Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down, in which the stated theme of justifications for violent acts is mainly an excuse for a polymath to map his own mind. Even when sections do not explicitly support the central thesis, they link to each other in intriguing ways. None of them should be considered extraneous.

 

Based on the texts, the author of Text 1 would most likely agree with the author of Text 2 on which point?

Musician and astronomer Darsan Swaroop Bellie researches gravitational waves. These invisible waves move very quickly through space. They cannot be viewed through a telescope, but they do make sounds that can be detected with special equipment. In his musical composition Dance of the Black Holes, Bellie demonstrates what gravitational waves might sound like as two black holes merge in space. With this composition and others, Bellie hopes to make aspects of science more accessible.

According to the text, what is the subject of Bellie's research?

The following text is from Yung Wing's 1909 memoir My Life in China and America.

We landed in New York on the 12th of April, 1847, after a passage of ninety-eight days of unprecedented fair weather. The New York of 1847 was altogether a different city from the New York of 1909. It was a city of only 250,000 or 300,000 inhabitants; now it is a metropolis rivaling London in population, wealth and commerce. The whole of Manhattan Island is turned into a city of skyscrapers, churches and palatial residences.

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

One antipredator defense that the grey-headed lapwing uses to protect its nest and young chicks is called "broken-wing display"; this form of deceptive defense involves an adult bird pretending to be injured and unable to fly in order to distract an approaching predator. Broken-wing display has been documented in 285 bird species from 13 different avian orders. A student predicts that bird species with mean body masses greater than 150 grams do not use deceptive defenses because larger birds tend to be more effective than smaller birds at using aggressive defenses to protect nests from predators, making deceptive defenses unnecessary.

 

Which choice most effectively uses data from the table that weaken the student's prediction?

Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge is an 1838 historical account by Eleanor Eldridge and Frances Harriet Whipple Green. In the book, the authors assert that all people naturally have an emotional attachment to where they live, writing, __________.

Which quotation from Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge most effectively illustrates the claim?

The End-Triassic mass extinction happened approximately 201 million years ago, when about 80 percent of species (including many species of bivalves) died off. Researchers have proposed the effects of a sudden release of carbon dioxide as one mechanism that may have brought on this mass extinction. But mass extinctions while abrupt in geological terms, unfold over thousands or millions of years: it's likely that multiple factors drove widespread species loss.

Based on the text, the author would most likely agree with which statement about the End-Triassic mass extinction?

Right-handedness is overwhelmingly prevalent in humans. Among studies of laterality in nonhuman primates, William C. McGrew and colleagues' 1999 study of wild chimpanzees reported no tendency toward right-handedness, while Mara Aruguete and colleagues' 1992 study of captive chimpanzees and squirrel monkeys did. However, the latter study included only 27 individuals, and a meta-analysis of primate-laterality studies demonstrated that a minimum sample size of 176 individuals is required to be confident that a finding of population-level handedness is not mere statistical noise. The claim of right-handedness in the 1992 study should therefore be treated skeptically given that __________.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Outi Tervo and team studied the effect of human-caused noise on narwhals (Monodon monoceros), arctic marine mammals that are sensitive to acoustic changes in their environment. Hypothesizing that elevated sound levels affect foraging among narwhals, Tervo's team compared narwhal diving behaviors in natural sound conditions with those behaviors in two human-caused sound exposure conditions—ship sounds and ship sounds coupled with sonic pulses. Both exposure conditions resulted in significant decreases in the number and target depth of deep dives (associated with foraging) relative to natural conditions. However, differences between diving behaviors in the two exposure types were negligible, a finding that could be attributed to the fact that __________.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

"What stories like this do for us is make the world just a smidge bigger," writes Stephen Graham Jones in the foreword to Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology. For Jones, dark fiction does more than entertain readers: _________ horror tropes to challenge familiar ways of knowing, blurring the "borders of the real."

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

Mary Cassatt and Edith Haworth were among the 300 artists who exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show, a groundbreaking New York City art exhibition that introduced modernism to American audiences. Marcel Duchamp's abstract cubist aesthetic received the most skepticism from critics, as ____________ represented a radical departure from the more realistic painting style that was popular at the time.

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

Polymers used in industrial applications are weakened by environmental stress, mechanical fatigue, and unexpected damage. However, new types of polymers have been engineered to repair_____________ aided by embedded microcapsules, such materials begin to self-heal.

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

The International Wheelchair Basketball Federation (IWBF) is one of many sports organizations that collect and analyze data on player performance. Coaches in the IWBF ___________ these data to help them develop game strategies that have a high probability of success.

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

As a behavioral economist, Heather Sarsons of the University of British Columbia explores how psychological factors (such as emotion and bias) influence the economic choices that individuals __________ Sarsons's research considers the broader effects these choices have on the economy.

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

In Amarna, Egypt, archaeologist Anna Hodgkinson unearthed bits of glass near lower-status dwellings, which she believes may refute the long-held notion that the material was enjoyed exclusively by Ancient Egyptian royalty. __________ archaeologist Thilo Rehren states flatly that glass doesn't appear to have been "a closely controlled royal commodity," concurring, based on his own research, that the material was more common than once surmised.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

A team led by Portuguese researcher Isabel C. FR. Ferreira found that many species of mushrooms contain chemicals called phenolic compounds, such as protocatechuic acid and biochanin. ___________ Ferreira detected protocatechuic acid in Agaricus bisporus mushrooms and biochanin in Ganoderma lucidum mushrooms.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Many past Olympic Games featured demonstration sports—nonmedal events—to showcase sports related to the host country. These events included sumo, a Japanese form of wrestling, and pärkspel, a Swedish ball sport. ________ they were chosen as demonstration sports at the Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan, and Stockholm, Sweden, respectively.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

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

· Kumiko is a Japanese woodworking technique in which thin strips of wood are interlaced to create latticed panels that incorporate intricate patterns.

· These wooden strips are fit together without the use of nails or other fasteners.

· Many of the geometric patterns used in kumiko designs are inspired by elements from nature.

· The overlapping hexagons of the kikko pattern resemble a tortoise's shell.

· The curved fan shapes of the seigaiha pattern resemble ocean waves.

The student wants to make and support a claim about the inspiration for kumiko patterns. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

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

· In music theory, the term "key" refers to the set of musical notes that forms the foundation of a piece of music.

· In Règles de Composition (1682), French composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier describes the mood of various musical keys.

· He describes the key of G major as "serious and magnificent."

· "Hero" (2001) by Enrique Iglesias is a song written in G major.

The student wants to explain how Charpentier describes G major. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

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

· The willow oak is a species of deciduous tree.

· Its scientific name is Quercus phellos.

· It is native to the Southeastern ecoregion of the US.

The student wants to indicate which ecoregion the willow oak is native to. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

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

· The wedge-rumped storm petrel is a species of bird.

· It has an average weight of 23 grams.

· It can be found on the Galápagos Island of Marchena.

· The Galápagos Islands are a group of islands that have many different species of birds.

The student wants to specify the average weight of the wedge-rumped storm petrel. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?