SAT Pastpaper with Solutions

When trying to determine why an apartment's circuit breaker has shut off, an electrician will usually ask tenants to __________ the devices that were in use when the electricity failed. This information is necessary so that the electrician can begin figuring out whether the continued outage is caused by a defective device or simply by too many devices running at the same time.

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

In restaurant kitchen ventilation design and construction, engineers carefully balance incoming and outgoing airflow to _________ negative pressure conditions. If the air pressure is lower in the kitchen than in nearby areas (that is, if there is negative pressure), fresh air will move from those areas into the kitchen, helping contain cooking odors and keep kitchen staff comfortable.

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

A distinctive habitat at the boundary between surface water and groundwater in river corridors, a river's hyporheic zone (HZ) can extend well beyond its banks: for a major river like the Mississippi, the HZ may reach as far as 300 meters from the main channel. Because it is difficult to access directly, scientists use __________ to assess the HZ—for example, by tracking aquatic organisms found in soil past a river's banks.

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

The following text is adapted from the 1898 poem "Odina" by Emily Pauline Johnson, a

Kanien' kehá:ka (Mohawk) writer also known as Tekahionwake.

 

I am Odina, I am she, the wife

Of him whose name breathes valor and life

And courage to the people who call him chief.

l am Odina, his bright star, and hels earth, and river, and sky—and soul to me.

 

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

Early television criticism in the 1970s and 1980s drew heavily on film studies, though media scholar Jane Feuer observed that concepts borrowed from that discipline often fell short when applied to television' s distinctive features. Recognizing those limits, researchers turned to approaches that considered home viewing environments, built-in commercials, and episodic storytelling, as well as to audience studies using ethnographic methods that highlighted viewer participation. By the 1990s, television studies had become a broadly established academic field, with scholars launching specialized journals.

 

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

Many models predict that as temperatures rise, North American tree populations will spread northward into habitats that are becoming newly suitable. However, forest surveys indicate that many species, such as the bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa) and the lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta), are showing migration lag—that is, they are not establishing northern populations as predicted. Research suggests that this lag is connected to reduced diversity of essential fungal partners at the northern edges of the trees' ranges, making successful northward expansion difficult.

Which choice best describes the overall structure of the text?

Text 1

Studies adding to the evidence that people generally enjoy socializing have often focused on interactions within ongoing relationships (from siblings to coworkers), but psychologist Lina Mercado and colleagues have shown the value of making connections with strangers. Participants in their study who warmly greeted a campus bus driver reported greater positive affect than those who didn' t speak to the driver.

 

 

Text 2

Research on social ties often relies on a model that places an individual within three concentric circles. The innermost circle contains one' s strongest ties (e. g.,a beloved friend), the next contains close but less central ties (e. g., a classmate on a club team), and the outermost contains weak ties (those more distant but still important enough to count as part of one' s social network).

 

Based on the texts, what would Mercado and colleagues (Text 1) most likely say about the discussion of the model in Text 2?

Having found that object emojis generally have a negative effect when used in social media marketing, Anika Desai and team studied reactions to three versions of a bakery's message about tea: one with a teacup emoji after the text (supplement), one with the emoji standing in for the word "tea" (substitute), and one with no emoji (control). Participants rated their openness to the content of the version of the message they saw, on a scale from 1 (not at all open) to 7 (very open). The team hypothesized that the general effect they'd previously observed would be reduced when an emoji replaces the word it represents.

 

Which choice best describes date from the graph that support the team's hypothesis?

 

To investigate how trees influence the chemistry of rainwater, a student consulted data collected during several precipitation events at sites in a temperate forest in the upper Midwest of the United States. The student considered three kinds of rainwater samples: regular (falling directly into a container), throughfall (passing through the tree canopy), and stemflow (running down branches and trunks). Noting that regular samples had average concentrations of 0.90mg/L of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and 0.19mg/L of total dissolved nitrogen (TDN) across events, the student concluded that contact with trees changes the chemical composition of rainwater before it reaches the ground.

 

Which choice best explains how well the data in the table support the student's conclusion?

After showing that the power-conversion efficiency of newly developed perovskite solar cells is nearly the same as that of cells recycled several times, Meilin Zhou and colleagues calculated the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE)—the cost per unit of electricity generated, including both material-acquisition and operating expenses—for power plants using each type of cell. Assuming a 15-year cell lifetime, the LCOE for plants using new cells was 4.99 cents per kilowatt-hour, whereas the LCOE for plants using cells recycled three times was 4.05 cents per kilowatt-hour. Furthermore, when the assumed cell lifetime was reduced by two-thirds, the LCOE difference increased from 18.8% to 31.3%.

 

Based on the text, which choice, if true, best accounts for the observation presented in the underlined sentence?

The Qimmiq, an Arctic breed believed to date to before Europeans arrived in the Americas, descends from a precontact dog population. The Qimmiq carries a haplotype (a group of genetic variants inherited together from one parent) absent in European dogs but present in Northeast Asian dogs, supporting the idea that precontact breeds in the Americas descend from dogs that accompanied human migration from Asia during the last ice age. The Dixie dingo, a tan-coated breed native to the rural Gulf Coast of the United States, offers additional support: living individuals carry haplotype B217, part of a haplotype group unique to Northeast Asian dogs. Many other precontact breeds, such as Canada' s Tahltan bear dog, disappeared through interbreeding with dogs brought from Europe.

 

Which finding, if true, would most directly undermine the underlined claim?

Orbicella faveolata, a Caribbean coral with a boulder-like shape, and Pocillopora eydouxi, a coral from the Indian Ocean with branching clusters, are both stony corals—the type that builds reefs. Increasing stony coral colonies worldwide is a key objective for ecologists, since land-based runoff and other pressures are causing growing harm to reefs. In the wild, crustose coralline algae (CCA) promote growth in the healthy reefs they inhabit by releasing lipids and other metabolites—chemical cues that trigger coral larvae settlement. Biotechnology researcher Lina Haddad and team have developed a tool to restore those cues in damaged reefs: a gel coating infused with metabolites derived from Indian Ocean CCA. In tests with Porites lutea, an Indian Ocean stony coral, settlement rates rose substantially.

Which finding, if true, would best support a claim that the new tool already has the capacity to support the scope of the ecologists' objective?

For brands of bottled iced tea sold in Australia, the mean line length—the number of products sharing a brand name—is 10.2, while for brands of cookies, the mean line length is 24.1. Elena Markovic and colleagues examined 203 months of economic data to investigate whether line length mediates the effects of economic expansions and contractions on brand equity (the value, manifesting as a price premium, that a brand has in consumers' minds due to its perceived quality and other associations). They noted that it becomes more difficult for consumers to evaluate brand quality as line length increases and that consumers show high risk aversion during economic downturns. Markovic and colleagues would thus expect that ___________.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

"Golden Hours" by Clara J. Whitmore, published in the Chicago Evening Post in 1878, exemplifies the phenomenon of "fugitive verse," poems reprinted in newspapers and other nineteenth-century US periodicals without authorial oversight or even, in many cases, knowledge. Though poems that became fugitive verse were typical of newspaper poetry of their era in their reliance on such elements as simple rhyme schemes and everyday settings, the phenomenon of fugitive verse represents a significant departure from the dominant model of literary authorship in which a work is controlled by a single and publicly identified author. This practice, however, was accepted as routine, even by the poets affected; that it has come to seem anomalous is indicative of the fact that ___________.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

According to period records, courtly entertainment—including cards, dice, and other games enjoyed in palaces and wealthy households—_________ primarily centered on strategic play that reflected social hierarchies. Trick-taking card games, with their ranked suits and formal rules, were especially fashionable during this era.

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

A 1932 report by celebrated US track coach Lawson Robertson ________ that the limits of human physiology ruled out a mile time under 4:01.6 was disproved by Roger Bannister's sub-four-minute mile in 1954—not to mention the fact that more than 2,000 runners have since matched Bannister's feat.

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

In recent years, the English poet Charlotte Smith (1749-1806), whose verse was widely read during her lifetime, has been rediscovered by contemporary audiences—a resurgence of interest that is largely due to literary scholars such as Elena Matthews, whose work _________ the richness of Smith's poems and the poet's historical importance to the Romantic literary movement encourages a broader rethinking of British Romanticism itself.

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

Curator Elena Martinez organized the 2026 exhibition Hidden Threads: Clara Wells's Textile Archive at the Oregon Historical Museum in Portland with a twofold ____________ the achievements of Wells, an innovative early-20th-century textile historian, and highlighting the museum's extensive fabric collection.

 

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

The furnaces used in ancient China to produce glazed tiles reached heights of 150 feet and diameters of 24 feet. These massive structures were used to heat clay mixtures to temperatures of up to 230 degrees __________ such intense heat produced chemical effects that couldn't occur with air-dried materials.

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

The scientific team using the Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) to conduct a cosmological survey, which has produced one of the most detailed 3D maps of the cosmos to date, plans to observe roughly 45 million celestial objects. Mounted on a telescope in Chile, ___________.

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

Fragments of ceramic griddles have been uncovered across southeastern Anatolia, dating to the Chalcolithic Period. Molina et al. wanted to determine whether the use-wear patterns on the griddle fragments were consistent with the cooking of oil-rich flatbreads. _________ they cooked such flatbreads in reconstructed griddles and compared the use-wear patterns on the reconstructed tools with those on the fragments.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Even though it is about 1,400 light-years from Earth, the star Mintaka is still one of the brightest stars visible in the night sky, ranking 31st. While not as bright as Mintaka, the star Merak also ranks among the 50 brightest stars, coming in 39th. _________ Merak's brightness is probably explained by its relative closeness to Earth: Merak is only about 80 light-years away.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Mark di Suvero's steel sculpture Schubert Sonata is displayed at Millennium Park, an outdoor art space in Chicago. __________ it is exposed to rain, snow, heat, and humidity. Di Suvero's sculpture is particularly well suited to withstand these conditions, though, because it is made of weathering steel.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

When ordering the branches of the Stikine River system, cartographers tend to begin with the riverway' s lowest point, the Stikine River. __________ hydrologists begin at the top of the river system, with the Tuya River and other tributaries fed by the riverway' s source, Tuya Lake.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

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

· A 2023 investigation examined the facial expressions of wolves and domestic dogs.

· In the investigation, facial expressions were coded using 46 distinct facial actions.

· The "ears rotator" facial action is seen in wolves.

· Dog breeds with upright (wolf-like) ears can produce the "ears rotator" facial action.

· Dog breeds with drooped or partly drooped (non-wolf-like) ears cannot produce the "ears rotator" facial action.

The student wants to contrast dog breeds with wolf-like ears and dog breeds with non-wolf-like ears. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?

While researching a topic, a student took the following notes:

· Late 1800s to early 1900s: Japanese manga (comics) typically used an orderly vertical format with four panels on each page.

· Late 1800s to late 1980s: Strongly influenced by manga,Taiwanese manhua (comics) also tended to use a structured layout.

· After 1945: Manga artists began experimenting with panels of different sizes to heighten visual tension (for example, by creating visual sight lines between a character in one panel and an object in the next).

· 1947 to late 1980s: Taiwanese manhua artists adopted additional manga traits, such as genre features and greater narrative complexity.

The student wants to describe how Taiwanese manhua relates to manga from the late 1800s through the late 1980s. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?