SAT Pastpaper with Solutions

Fossil records have allowed us to identify species like the Columbian mammoth, an animal found throughout the area from the northern US to Central America before it became extinct around 5800 BCE. Current figures for the number of extinct species from this period, however, are likely to be underestimates, as most extinct animals are thought to be________: many scientists believe there are hundreds of species from this time that we have not discovered.

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

Exposed to harsh environmental conditions for centuries, lighthouses such as La Jument lighthouse off the coast of Brittany, France, exemplify the_________between marine structures and ocean forces: the continuous impact of breaking waves necessitates periodic reinforcements to or redesigns of the structures that in turn may alter local wave patterns.

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

_________the mythological and heroic subject matter often found in works by Horace Vernet and other establishment figures, Honoré Daumier's painting The Third-Class Carriage instead focuses on something decidedly mundane: working-class travelers in a third-class railway car.

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

Typically, synthetic leather is petroleum based, but materials scientists searching for an ecologically sustainable alternative have used various bacteria that secrete linear chains of glucose, forming a dense mesh of cellulose called a pellicle, which is leatherlike except in color. The standard process for dyeing leather generates substantial wastewater and other undesirable byproducts, so adopting such a regimen would run counter to the ecological promise of the pellicle approach. To address this, Kenneth T. Walker and colleagues worked to modify Komagataeibacter rhaeticus bacteria to produce a pellicle with embedded pigmentation cells, thereby allowing the pellicle to "dye" itself from the inside.

 

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

Establishing protected areas (PAs), such as the Mamanuca Islands in Fiji, is a common conservation strategy, but because PAs restrict some kinds of economic activity, it's widely thought that they hinder economic development. This perception is driven in part by the fact that economic assessments often don't capture the indirect effects of tourism linked to PAs. But Hasita Bhammar et al. found that tourism associated with the Mamanuca Islands boosts local demand for goods and services in other economic sectors, resulting in, for instance, increased income from retail in nearby areas.

Which choice best describes the overall structure of the text?

Optimal foraging theory (OFT) holds that animals' foraging behaviors reflect cost-benefit trade-offs that vary by species and with dynamic ecological circumstances. One such circumstance is lunar intensity, which W. J. Cresswell and Stephen Harris found to be negatively associated with foraging by European badgers but Eduardo Fernández-Duque and colleagues found to be positively associated with foraging by Azara's night monkeys. This discrepancy is explicable in terms of OFT: the monkeys' greater reliance on vision means that higher lunar intensity benefits them more than it benefits the badgers.

Information in the text best supports which statement about Azara's night monkeys?

Text 1

Mooseberry (Viburnum edule) plants are native to Alaska, where harsh conditions have historically impeded potential invasive species. As the boreal climate has warmed in recent decades, however, common knotgrass (Polygonum aviculare) plants have established themselves in Alaska. Previous research conducted in non-boreal ecosystems has documented warming-induced increases in summer temperatures benefiting invasive species more than native species.

Text 2

At a site near Fairbanks, Alaska, Christa Mulder and Katie Spellman tracked V. edule and P.aviculare, along with other native and invasive species, over several years. They observed that although average summer temperatures were substantially higher in some years of the study than in others, neither V. edule nor P. aviculare showed any significant variation in summer growth patterns from year to year.

Which choice best describes the relationship between the two texts?

A Pew Research Center survey conducted in January 2024 found that three out of ten US adults make at least one New Year's resolution (a promise for the year ahead), while half of those who make a resolution make more than one. The survey asked participants what kinds of resolutions they made and separated them into several categories. The table presents percentages of people who make particular kinds of New Year's resolutions among those who choose to make them, indexed by age bracket.

 

Which choice best presents a conclusion about the habits of New Year's resolution makers that is best supported by information in the text and the table?

Esther Sanyé-Mengual, Kathrin Specht, and their team surveyed three groups of people in Bologna, Italy—leaders of urban agriculture projects, stakeholders in urban agriculture (e.g., food researchers and urban farming associations), and the general public—to compare their views about the extent to which urban agriculture contributes to 25 social or ecological services that the team identified. The researchers used these ratings to rank the services for each group, with a ranking of 1 indicating that a group perceives that urban agriculture benefits that service the most. Using only the rankings shown in the table, a city planner in Bologna who is promoting a new urban agriculture project concludes that advertisements aimed at project leaders should emphasize the project's benefit to the enhancement of pollination.

 

Which choice best describes data in the table that support the city planner's conclusion?

Richard II is a play from the 1590s by William Shakespeare. Although King Richard has been vanquished by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, he intimates that he is not entirely ready to show subservience to his cousin, saying,__________.

Which quotation from Richard II most effectively illustrates the claim?

Duckweed is a small freshwater plant that is often exposed to zinc pollution. Sofia Vámos and colleagues collected samples of four duckweed ecotypes (genetically and geographically distinct populations within a species), along with water from each ecotype's habitat. Hypothesizing that each ecotype is adapted to its local conditions in ways that bolster its growth and resistance to pollutants, the researchers grew each ecotype in all four water samples and with three levels of zinc (none, low, high). (The researchers did not replicate local differences in light or temperature.) They found that the ecotypes grew equally well in all four water samples and that adding zinc consistently enhanced growth, regardless of concentration, suggesting that___________.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Scholars cite Men of Maize, the 1949 novel by Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias, as a foundational text of magical realism, the Latin American style of fiction in which antirealistic plot devices—often borrowed from the spiritual and narrative traditions of Indigenous and colonial societies in the Americas—are deployed in an otherwise realistic mode of representation typical of the modern novel. This style has exerted a decisive influence on authors in the United States, including Susan Power, whose 1994 novel The Grass Dancer resembles classic magical realist novels in its juxtaposition of literary realism with long-established cultural traditions—namely, those of the Dakota people of the northern plains.

 

Which quotation from a literary scholar would most directly support the claim in the underlined portion of the text?

While mammals collectively exhibit the highest ratio of brain size to body size among vertebrates, a team led by paleontologist Ornella Bertrand demonstrates that for ten million years following the extinction of dinosaurs, that ratio in fact shrank for mammals as they evolved to fill newly vacated ecological niches and their bodies increased in size more rapidly than their brains. Competition for resources tends to favor intelligence and thus large, complex brains, but during this period, the abundance of resources relative to mammalian population numbers likely moderated competition and facilitated an increase in body size. Bertrand and her team reason that as population numbers swelled, competition intensified, creating conditions that__________.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Novelist and playwright Mary Russell Mitford joined with 55 other prominent British writers in 1837 to petition the US Congress for greater copyright protections. This cadre of renowned________that American publishers' appropriation of their work caused, in the words of the petition, "deep and extensive injuries.. on their reputation and property," helped sow the seeds for the International Copyright Act of 1891.

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

The statement "all tarantulas are venomous" is scientific because it could be proved false by a single observation to the contrary, according to Karl Popper. Popper's theory _________that scientific hypotheses must be refutable, termed the criterion of falsifiability, rejects the confirmationist position that uses verifiability as the standard for scientific hypotheses.

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

To British musician Jacob Collier, substituting the ll chord for the bvii chord-its opposite in pitch and tone-adds expression to improvisation without creating dissonance. This conceptualization of harmonic opposites did not originate with_________in 1985, the idea was first articulated in Swiss musicologist Ernst Levy's posthumously published book A Theory of Harmony.

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

Astronomers Annie and Edward Maunder meticulously studied historical records of dark areas on the sun's surface known as sunspots. Their work in the late 1800s led to the identification of a period from 1645 to 1715—now known as the Maunder________ sunspots were notably scarce, a phenomenon that solar physicists continue to investigate.

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

Enacted in 1991, Latvia's 4,917-word constitution, in contrast to Chile's, which was enacted in 1980 and contains a far greater number (25,821) of words,________ as the 4th shortest in the world. Such data are studied by constitutional scholars like Dominic J. Nardi, who can use them to draw broader conclusions.

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

As volcanologists like Tamsin Mather are apt to make clear, not all volcanoes are the same. Ischia in Italy, for example, is a complex volcano, a mixed landform consisting of related volcanic centers and their associated lava flows and pyroclastic rock. Mount Vsevidof in Alaska,___________ is a stratovolcano, a conical volcano built up by many layers of hardened lava and tephra.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

Charles Demuth's 1931 painting Chimney and Water Tower is a classic Precisionist work. The Precisionists strove for cold, machine-like perfection, with crisp lines, geometric shapes, and smooth, brushstroke-free surfaces. _________Precisionist works often feature skyscrapers, bridges, and factories, highlighting these angular structures' engineered symmetry.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

When ordering the branches of the Yukon River system, cartographers tend to begin with the riverway's lowest point, the Yukon River. _________ hydrologists begin at the top of the river system, with the Iditarod River and other tributaries fed by the riverway's source, Alaska's Llewellyn Glacier.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

The early Australian railroad system of the 1800s was famously uncoordinated. Trains on the broad gauge Victorian Goldfields Railway line in Victoria couldn't travel on the Hotham Valley Railway in Western Australia, which used narrow gauge tracks, without performing time-consuming conversions.__________ historians refer to this complicated system as the "mixed gauge muddle."

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

As anthropologist Cristina Grasseni explains, many artisanal cheeses in Italy, such as Provolone Valpadana from Trentino-Alto Adige and Ragusano from Sicily, are highly valued for their regional authenticity;__________ they are prized for being made using local ingredients and methods typical of their respective geographic regions.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

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

· The farm-size transition hypothesis predicts that economic pressures associated with modernization result in smaller farms amalgamating into larger-scale commercial farms.

· Masters et al. (2013): The average farm size in Asia "already has or will soon begin to rise."

· Promkhambut et al. (2023) argue that small rice farms in Thailand have adopted modern farming methods without a significant scaling-up of farm size.

· Promkhambut et al.: "The persistence of [small] rice farms [in Thailand] does not represent a 'failure' to modernize. or a 'truncated' transition-it is a response to modernization."

 

The student wants to make and support a claim regarding the applicability of the farm-size transition hypothesis to Thailand. 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:

· 1914: British explorer Ernest Shackleton and a small crew embarked on an expedition to Antarctica.

· 1915: Shackleton's ship Endurance became stuck in ice before eventually breaking apart and sinking.

· 1916: After more harrowing sea-ice adventures, the entire crew was rescued.

· 1959: Historian Alfred Lansing wrote a book called Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage.

· 2001: Filmmaker George Butler released a documentary called The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition.

· 2022: The wreckage of Endurance was discovered at the bottom of Antarctica's Weddell Sea.

The student wants to provide a historical overview of the Shackleton expedition. 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:

· Louis Ballard was a classical composer and citizen of the Quapaw Tribe.

· Ballard's composition Desert Trilogy was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in music in 1971.

· His composition Cacega Ayuwipi incorporates Hopi notched sticks, a traditional Native instrument.

· Ethnomusicologist Tara Browner claims that Ballard's compositions rely on elements originating within Native musical traditions.

The student wants to support Browner's claim about Louis Ballard's compositions. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?