SAT Pastpaper with Solutions

The sloping tile roofs and picturesque façade of Mission San Rafael Arcángel in San Rafael, California, are enduring symbols of the Spanish contribution to Californian architecture. Elements of this style have been reproduced throughout the state—the design of the San Gabriel Mission Playhouse in San Gabriel, for example, is considered to_________the style of the Spanish missions.

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

As an undergraduate researcher in anthropology, Jennifer C. Chen contributed to a groundbreaking study challenging the accepted view that among prehistoric peoples, female participation in hunting was ______. The research team's review of data from late Pleistocene and early Holocene burials in the Americas revealed that, in fact, as many as half of the hunters in those populations were female.

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

The following text is adapted from Jhumpa Lahiri's 2003 novel The Namesake. Gogol is an elementary school student in Massachusetts.

In art class, his favorite hour of the week, he carves his name with paper clips into the bottoms of clay cups and bowls. He pastes uncooked pasta to cardboard, and leaves his signature in fat brush strokes below paintings.

As used in the text, what do the words "carves" and "leaves" both most nearly mean?

With examples ranging from the Lost Blue Hole in the Bahamas to Nancy's Blue Hole in the Abaco Islands, blue holes are large underwater sinkholes: pits filled with dark blue water that contrasts with lighter blue shallower waters surrounding them. The formation of blue holes typically involves several natural processes, including the dissolution of limestone or other soluble rocks. Currently, the deepest blue hole on record is the Taam Ja' Blue Hole in Chetumal Bay, Mexico, which is reported by Laura Carrillo and colleagues as extending at least 420 meters below sea level.

Which choice best describes the overall structure of the text?

Before the 1858 publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin developed his theory of natural selection in five erratically dated personal notebooks labeled A through E. In his notebooks, Darwin first expressed one of natural selection's principles: that species produce more offspring than available resources can sustain. An entry in notebook D references "the warring of the species" for survival—an essential component of Darwin's theory. The comment, made in or after early fall 1838, suggests that authoring On the Origin of Species was a process spanning decades.

Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?

Many people use the trademark "Frisbee" to refer generally to flying disc toys rather than specifically to products made by Wham-0, the company that owns the trademark. As many legal experts note, this may pose a problem for Wham-0. In the US, courts can cancel a trademark if they decide that its meaning is no longer specific to the trademark owner's products. If "Frisbee were judged to be a generic term, as "aspirin" was, other companies would be free to use it to promote similar products, making it harder for Wham-0 to stand out from competitors.

Based on the text, what do many legal experts believe about the trademark "Frisbee"?

Text 1

Economist 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 Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, in which the stated theme of the varieties of melancholy 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, how would the author of Text 2 most likely respond to the statement in the underlined portion of Text 1?

In 2021, Rocío Uría-Martínez, Megan M. Johnson, and Rul Shan published a report on hydroelectric power plants operating in the US as recently as 2019, and data from their report are shown in the table. Of the plants in the table, the plant with the lowest average power generated per year in 2019 was located on the ___________.

 

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

Aerial robots vary considerably in their holding force; the Ultra-Fast Robot Hand, for example, has a holding force of 56 newtons, more than twice that of the Permanent Magnet Hand and more than four times that of the Yale Model T. Since an aerial robot must lift its own weight along with its cargo, engineer Jiawei Meng and colleagues used a ratio of each robot's holding force to the robot's weight to calculate payload capacity, with higher ratios corresponding to greater capacity, concluding that the Ultra-Fast Robot Hand has a higher payload capacity than the Yale Model T.

 

Which choice best describes data in the graph that support Meng and colleagues' conclusion?

The Man in the Brown Suit is a 1924 novel by Agatha Christie. In the novel, the protagonist, Anne Beddingfeld, expresses a deep desire for excitement and a frustration with the dullness of her life, saying,____________.

Which quotation from The Man in the Brown Suit most effectively illustrates the claim?

In the early 19th century, ships in the British Royal Navy were ranked based on military strength. The system considered the number of a ship's cannons and decks. "First-rate" was the highest ranking, and "sixth-rate" was the lowest ranking, followed by unranked ships. Ships of a high enough rank were called "ships of the line," since they were thought to be able to stand in battle formation. Such ships had larger crews than those without that label. Three of the ships in the British Royal Navy were the Diomede (50 cannons and two decks), the Boyne (98 cannons and three decks), and the Nelson (120 cannons and three decks). Among these, only the Boyne and the Nelson were considered ships of the line. It can therefore be concluded that___________.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

British professional soccer team Arsenal Football Club, whose home uniform color is mainly red, won more than half its home matches between 1947 and 2003. This is a higher proportion of home matches than Coventry City Football Club, whose home uniform color is not red, won during the same period. According to a study by Martin J. Attrill and colleagues, the color red can cause people to respond with fear and hesitation, which the researchers think helps explain Arsenal's success. Nadav Goldschmied and colleagues reanalyzed the published data from this study, however, and found no evidence that red-uniformed teams are more likely than other teams to win, suggesting that Arsenal's success at its home stadium is____________.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Flowers that produce relatively high volumes of nectar are more rewarding for pollinators, including stripe-tailed hummingbirds (Eupherusa eximia) and other hummingbird species, but nectar stores are typically obscured by the corolla (collection of petals); the means by which flowers signal high-nectar reward are unclear. A 2007 study by Juan Francisco Ornelas et al., which found that corolla length positively correlates with nectar volume, concluded that flower morphology reliably indicates nectar reward. As part of a subsequent study, María A. Maglianesi et al. measured variations in floral phenotypic traits (including corolla length and nectar characteristics) of hummingbird-visited plants across a range of elevations in Costa Rica.

Which finding from Maglianesi et al.'s study, if true, would most directly undermine Ornelas et al.'s conclusion?

Rudolf Cesaretti et al. conducted an analysis of historical urban scaling trends circa 1300 CE in Western Europe, focusing on agglomeration patterns within medieval settlements. They examined settlements in urban systems across Western Europe, with groupings based on regionally distinct political structures, economic focuses, and spatial constraints—including the aristocratically controlled city-state of Parma in northern Italy, merchant controlled city-states like Hamburg in Germany, the wool-trading centers of Oxford and Salisbury in England, and prime trade-fair towns like Troyes in France. A prevalent trend emerged: as a city's total settled area increased, so did population density in its core urban areas. This finding implies that _____________.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

An assistant professor at Stanford University, Chelsea Finn works on developing artificial intelligence technology, with a specific focus on deep ___________learning involves teaching computers to process data in the same way a human brain would.

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

In 1801, Great Britain joined with Ireland to form the United Kingdom (UK). Writers from every part of the UK, not just England, deserve credit for the literary outpouring that followed, with Scottish novelist William Black (A Daughter of Heth, 1871), Irish novelist Shan Bullock (By Thrasna River, 1895), and Welsh novelist Anne Puddicombe (A Welsh Singer, 1896) all__________.

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

A great discovery for any art historian is finding a connective thread linking seemingly disparate artists—Romanian abstract painter Hedda Sterne of the mid-twentieth century and Italian Renaissance painter Cima da Conegliano of the fifteenth century, for__________across continents, genres, and time.

 

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

As part of his Today series, Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara spent nearly fifty years—with near daily consistency—writing the date in simple white strokes on a monochrome background, resulting in pieces such as FEB. 14, 1967. Such meticulous documentation of mundane ____________artworks that "resonate with existential, psychological and scientific implications about the time-space continuum," according to the New York Times, became Kawara's life's work.

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

Latvia has the world's 4th shortest constitution (4,917 words). In their 2016 analysis, political_________presented statistical evidence that shorter constitutions correlate with higher GDPs (gross domestic products); less detailed constitutions, the scientists posit, have fewer provisions that could restrict necessary legislation during periods of economic volatility.

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

For several centuries after the birth of opera in sixteenth-century Florence, Italian remained the default language in which most opera scores were written. ________opera singers today, such as the bass-baritone Erwin Schrott, encounter a wide range of Italian terms—from semplicemente (simply) to rallentando (at a decelerating tempo)—when following many eighteenth-century opera scores.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

In a given rock formation, Lutetian rock from 47.8 million years ago might directly abut Gzhelian rock from 303.7 million years ago. But how could this happen? Time did not actually stand still during the intervening 255.9 million years;_________this geologic unconformity likely resulted from natural processes removing sedimentary material from the stratigraphic record.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

In a 2024 study, researchers investigating the biodiversity of trees in Amsterdam counted and classified the city's trees. They found notable variation in the percentage of native trees in different areas of the city. ____________more than half of the trees in administrative unit GE05 (54%) were native species, but only 12% of the trees in administrative unit GE04 were native species.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

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

· The exoplanet OGLE-TR-10 b (4,387 light-years from Earth) doesn't emit enough light to be observed by Earth- or space- based telescopes.

· Astronomers were able to detect the exoplanet indirectly by the transit method of planetary detection.

· In this method, astronomers analyzed the periodic dimming of the light emitted by a distant star.

· They determined that this dimming was caused by the orbit of an unseen exoplanet (OGLE-TR-10 b) passing between the star and the observation point.

· As of February 2024, the transit method had been used to detect 4,153 exoplanets.

The student wants to explain an advantage of the transit method. 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 French Republican calendar was used in France from 1793 to 1805.

· Each month was divided into three weeks of ten days each, followed by five supplemental days.

· Each day was named after a plant, animal, agricultural tool, or mineral as a way of honoring an aspect of rural life.

· Pluviôse is the fifth month in the calendar.

· The tenth day of Pluviôse is named Coignée, which means "axe."

The student wants to emphasize how the French Republican calendar honored rural life. 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 Ideas Toward an Aesthetic of Music (1806), German poet and composer Christian Schubart describes the mood of various musical keys.

· He describes the key of D flat major as containing "grief and rapture."

· "Thank U, Next"(2018) by Ariana Grande is a song written in D flat major.

The student wants to connect the song "Thank U, Next" to Schubart's description of musical keys. 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:

• John Updike was a renowned writer.

• His first published short story was called "Friends from Philadelphia."

• It is about a teenage boy who lives with his parents.

• It was published in The New Yorker in 1954.

• Its publication launched Updike's career as a professional fiction writer.

The student wants to explain why the publication of "Friends from Philadelphia" was a milestone for John Updike. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?