SAT Pastpaper with Solutions

In the second half of the sixteenth century, cobalt-based pigments __________ Germany, leading to the proliferation of stoneware ceramics featuring decorations with the distinctive blue coloration characteristic of cobalt compounds fired at high temperatures. Such decorations came to be a defining feature of Germany stoneware vessels of the period.

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

While some of the Mediterranean islands inhabited by prehistoric peoples were rich in resources and easily accessible from the mainland, others were resource-poor and could only be reached by grueling, hazardous, multiday voyages in rowboats. The motivations of the people who settled the latter are thus, from our modern perspective, _________.

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

Though William Shakespeare has been widely regarded as an unmatched genius of English literature for centries, he has had notable critics: breaking from contemporaries who ___________ his works, John Dryden in the seventeenth century and T.S. Eliot in the twentieth century instead spoke of his perceived artistic failings.

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

Though most hoaxes perpetrated as jokes by mischievous users of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that almost anyone can freely edit, have quickly been detected and removed, a few fictitious entries, such as those for the town of Stone Ridge, Maryland, and the World Bank president Maddi Fairthorne, persisted on the site for many years before they were finally recognized as _________ and deleted.

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

Art historian Barbara A. Kaminska has documented how Northern Renaissance artists who were deaf—a group about which considerable information has been passed down—were regarded by their artistic peers, their patrons, and their communities at large. Some lapses in available testimony do exist, particularly a dearth of autobiographical accounts by artists such as Jan Jansz. de Stomme (1615-1658), a portrait painter based in the Netherlands. In contrast, Kaminska's material about the apprenticeships and commissions of deaf artists such as de Stomme has proven sufficient to illustrate the complexity of attitudes towards deafness in the Dutch Golden Age, including the idea that the absence of sound (both lived and as a necessary condition of a painter's work) guided these creators.

Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?

The following text is from Viginia Woolf's short story "A Society," published in the 1921 collection Monday or Tuesday.

 

Then we had Fanny's account of her visit to the Law Courts. At her first visit she had come to the conclusion that the Judges were either made of wood or were impersonated by large animals resembling man who had been trained to move with extreme dignity, mumble and nod their heads. To test her theory she had liberated a handkerchief of bluebottles at the critical moment of a trial, but was unable to judge whether the creatures gave signs of humanity for the buzzing of the flies induced so sound a sleep that she only woke in time to see the prisoners led into the cells below.

 

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

Researchers created data set J72T12G24 to train a machine learning model to select the best existing algorithm for determining manufacturers' optimal production quantities while considering capacity constraints and other limiting factors. Comprising 7,200 simulated production planning instances, each involving seventy-two products across twelve time periods, the data set systematically varies three critical factors: product demand patterns (six scenarios, including fluctuating demand), production capacity utilization rates (high and low), and the balance between set-up and inventory holding costs (three scenarios).

Which statement about data set J72T12G24 is best supported by the text?

Text 1

Queen Elizabeth the First was both a poet and one of the most significant monarchs in English history—and that dual role guides much recent evaluation of her poetry. Mary Thomas Crane of the Poetry Foundation acknowledges that Elizabeth's "own writings do not begin to equal the greatest of her age" but were "important in creating and sustaining that age," echoing the common critical view that the monarch's historical agency is of more interest than her expressive powers.

 

 

Text 2

The literary output of Queen Elizabeth the First includes speeches, poems, letters, and translations. To a modern audience, her work across literary forms can appear remarkable. To Elizabeth's fellow aristocrats of the middle to late 1500s, writing adept-enough poetry and letters was a commonplace recreation among the elite: a sign of technical cleverness, which Elizabeth reached, rather than ingenious insight, more the province of playwrights such as Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Middleton.

 

 

Which choice best describes a difference in how Text 1 and Text 2 present the poetry of Queen Elizabeth the First?

A country's debt to GDP (gross domestic product) ratio can be understood as signaling that country's ability to pay back its debts; higher ratios indicate higher risks of defaulting on debt obligations and thus triggering repercussions such as an economic recession or widespread unemployment. For this reason, countries typically seek to cultivate low debt to GDP ratios, with 60% as an ideal level for a democratic country. At recent rates of change, however, this benchmark will continue to elude even those nations that are making progress towards reducing their debt to GDP ratios, with _________

 

Which choice most effectively completes the statement using relevant information from the table?

Exoplanets, or planetary bodies orbiting stars other than our Sun, currently fall into a few categories. Many exoplanets have been initially detected by indirect means (signals as they transit in front of their parent stars) that have then been verified, though others that have been "detected" indirectly and could represent false signals are classified as TESS candidates. Currently, there are more confirmed Neptune-like exoplanets than confirmed gas giant exoplanets, though this situation would change if __________

 

Which choice most effectively uses accurate information from the chart to complete the statement?

Heart of Darkness is an 1899 novel by Joseph Conrad. In the novel, a first-person narrator gathers with several of his friends. All of these characters have worked as sailors, yet one, Marlow, has an adventurous mentality that sets him apart from the others :________

Which quotation from Heart of Darkness most effectively illustrates the claim?

The epistemological discourse in contemporary sociology interrogates the axiomatic postulates that undergird society's structural edifices. Traditional paradigms posit that societal norms emerge organically from collective consciousness, yet recent scholars assert the reverse: that societal structures, in their inherent rigidity, engender these very norms. This intricate dance between structure and agency poses a conundrum. While individuals wield the agency to challenge or uphold societal expectations, they often remain ensnared within the very structures they seek to transcend. This dynamic interplay has further complicated our understanding of societal evolution, questioning the role of external influences, like technology or geopolitical shifts, in either reinforcing or disrupting established norms.

Which one of the following statements, if false, would be the most direct extension of the arguments in the passage?

During the series of 1879 hostilities now known as the Zulu War, fighting forces recruited from the agricultural communities of the Zulu Empire (located in present-day South Africa) confronted British troops. At the start of the nineteenth century, the eventual Zulu civilization existed primarily as a grouping autonomous adjacent towns, several of which were adversarial to one another; unification only took place around 1820 under the leadership of Shaka, a chieftain who made significant refinements to the training and weaponry of the Zulu army as well. If the British had encroached upon Zulu land one hundred years before the actual Zulu War, they would plausibly have encountered __________

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Regardless of the advanced cognitive abilities exhibited by octopuses, we naturally resist attributing certain hallmarks of human intellect—among them, the ability to alter lived environments and the further ability to bequeath those alterations to successive generations—to these cephalopods. Observations of the gloomy octopus (Octopus tetricus) now challenge this set of assumptions. Near Australia's Jervis Bay, a community of O. tetricus has cohered around shared resources—here, the scallop shells that provide material for individual O. tetricus nests—in groups that tend to number just over a dozen individuals, lending support to a conception of octopuses as _________

Which choice most logically completes the text?

In 1453, English King Henry VI became unfit to rule after falling gravely ill. As a result, Parliament appointed Richard, Third Duke of York, who had a strong claim to the English throne, to rule as Lord Protector. Upon recovering two years later, ______ forcing an angered Richard from the royal court and precipitating a series of battles later known as the Wars of the Roses.

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

The Arctic-Alpine Botanic Garden in Norway and the Jardim Botânico of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil are two of many botanical gardens around the world dedicated to growing diverse plant ______ fostering scientific research; and educating the public about plant conservation.

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

Hegra is an archaeological site in present-day Saudi Arabia and was the second largest city of the Nabataean Kingdom (fourth century BCE to first century CE). Archaeologist Laila Nehmé recently traveled to Hegra to study its ancient ______ into the rocky outcrops of a vast desert, these burial chambers seem to blend seamlessly with nature.

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

In 2015, a team led by materials scientists Anirudha Sumant and Diana Berman succeeded in reducing the coefficient of friction (COF) between two surfaces to the lowest possible level—superlubricity. A nearly frictionless (and, as its name suggests, extremely slippery) state, ______

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

In 2016, engineer Vanessa Galvez oversaw the installation of 164 bioswales, vegetated channels designed to absorb and divert stormwater, along the streets of Queens, New York. By reducing the runoff flowing into city sewers, ______

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

With its clichéd imagery of suburban lawns and power lines, John Ashbery's 2004 poem "Ignorance of the Law Is No Excuse" may seem barren terrain for critical analysis. ______ cultural critic Lauren Berlant finds fertile ground in just its first two stanzas, devoting most of a book chapter to deciphering the "weight of the default space" Ashbery creates in this poem.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

When designing costumes for film, American artist Suttirat Larlarb typically custom fits the garments to each actor. ______ for the film Sunshine, in which astronauts must reignite a dying Sun, she designed a golden spacesuit and had a factory reproduce it in a few standard sizes; lacking a tailor-made quality, the final creations reflected the ungainliness of actual spacesuits.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

The Sun and other stars are powered by nuclear fusion reactions, in which two atoms collide to form a single heavier atom, releasing energy. Scientists have long believed that fusion has the potential to meet humanity's clean energy needs. ______ prior to December 2022, no fusion reaction in a laboratory setting had ever generated a net energy gain.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

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

 

·British musicians John Lennon and Paul McCartney shared writing credit for numerous Beatles songs.

·Many Lennon-McCartney songs were actually written by either Lennon or McCartney, not by both.

·The exact authorship of specific parts of many Beatles songs, such as the verse for "In My Life," is disputed.

·Mark Glickman, Jason Brown, and Ryan Song used statistical methods to analyze the musical content of Beatles songs.

·They concluded that there is 18.9% probability that McCartney wrote the verse for "In My Life," stating that the verse is "consistent with Lennon's songwriting style."

 

The student wants to make a generalization about the kind of study conducted by Glickman, Brown, and song. 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:

 

·One of history's greatest libraries was the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, Iraq.

·It was founded in the eighth century with the goal of preserving all the world's knowledge.

·Scholars at the House of Wisdom collected ancient and contemporary texts from Greece, India, and elsewhere and translated them into Arabic.

·Writings included those of the Greek philosopher Aristotle and the Indian mathematician Aryabhata.

·The House of Wisdom used Chinese papermaking technology to create paper versions to be studied and shared.

 

The student wants to explain how the House of wisdom preserved the world's knowledge. 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 Atlantic Monthly magazine was first published in 1857.
·The magazine focused on politics, art, and literature.
·In 2019, historian Cathryn Halverson published the book Faraway Women and the "Atlantic Monthly."
·Its subject is female authors whose autobiographies appeared in the magazine in the early 1900s.
·One of the authors discussed is Juanita Harrison.

 

The student wants to introduce Cathryn Halverson's book to an audience already familiar with the Atlantic Monthly. 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 1971, experimental musician Pauline Oliveros created Sonic Meditations.
·Sonic Meditations is not music but rather a series of sound-based exercises called meditations.
·Each meditation consists of instructions for participants to make, imagine, listen to, or remember sounds.
·The instructions for Meditation V state, "walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears."
·Those for Meditation XVIII state, "listen to a sound until you no longer recognize it."

 

The student wants to provide an explanation and an example of Oliveros's Sonic Meditations. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?