SAT Pastpaper with Solutions

In a 2020 paper, Arya Udry et al. cautioned that although similarities in the isotopic signatures of elements detected in Mars's atmosphere and in Martian meteorites recovered on Earth make it tempting to treat the geochemical properties of the meteorites as__________those of Mars's interiors, Mars's geology cannot be ascertained based solely on meteorite-sample analyses.

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

Danza Azteca arose in the 1500s when the traditions of the Chichimeca Jonaz people_________those of other tribes in Central Mexico, creating a hybrid dance form that spread across Mexico and later to Mexican communities in the US. Chichimeca Jonaz influences can still be seen in the performances by groups like Danza Azteca Citlaltonac, which is based in Coachella, California.

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

The following text is from Anne Spencer's 1922 poem "Translation."

 

We trekked into a far country,

My friend and I.

Our deeper content was never spoken,

But each knew all the other said.

He told me how calm his soul was laid

By the lack of anvil and strife.

"The wooing kestrel," I said, "mutes his mating-note

To please the harmony of this sweet silence."

 

Which choice best describes the function of the reference to "anvil and strife" in the text as a whole?

The Federalist Papers are a collection of 85 essays written by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison. They were published pseudonymously in the New York Packet and other New York newspapers in 1787-88 and argue that New Yorkers should vote to ratify the proposed United States Constitution. Though the authorship of most of the individual essays is certain, that of a few is in question: for instance, while No. 15, "The Insufficiency of the Present Confederation to Preserve the Union,"was surely penned by Hamilton, No. 52,"The House of Representatives," may have been written by either Hamilton or Madison.

Which choice best states the main purpose of the text?

The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City has an exhibition of video games that includes Yars' Revenge from 1982, which museum visitors can play on site, and SimCity 2000 from 1994, which visitors can see only in a video presentation. MOMA claims the video presentations are only for games that would be impractical to display in a playable form, but video games are an inherently interactive medium, a feature that is grossly absent in a video-only presentation.

 

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

Autofiction is an emerging literary form that incorporates autobiographical writing into fiction. Practitioners of autofiction emphasize the autobiographical aspects of their work by patterning their protagonists' lives after their own, typically naming their protagonists after themselves. Autofiction usually borrows formal elements from autobiographical writing too, including its first person point of view and its use of a narrative voice so forthright that it borders on confessional. Ocean Vuong's 2019 novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a representative work of autofiction, one that erases the distinction that fiction typically observes between authors and the characters they create.

Which statement, if true, would most strongly support the text's description of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous?

A tariff is a tax on imported goods intended to protect domestic producers of similar goods from international competition. Eliminating tariffs can lead to an influx of cheaper imported goods, lowering prices; in a place where domestic production is relatively expensive, this influx can suppress domestic production, as the country's consumers favor more cheaply produced imported goods over domestically produced ones. A student consults a table showing projected changes in production and average market prices of agricultural commodities in four countries in a tariff-elimination scenario. Based on the data, the student claims that compared with India and Russia, agricultural production in Argentina and the United States is likely relatively inexpensive.

 

Which choice most effectively uses information from the text and data from the table to support the student's claim?

Studies of the population density of cougars (Puma concolor) have yielded a range of results, which may in part reflect differences in the effectiveness of the methods that researchers have used in their studies. If, for example, the use of helicopter surveying tends to lead to overestimates of cougar population density, that may explain why the study by_________.

 

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

In the 1980s, many musicians and journalists in the English-speaking world began to draw attention to music from around the globe—such as mbaqanga from South Africa and quan ho from Vietnam—that can't be easily categorized according to British or North American popular music genres, typically referring to such music as "world music." While some scholars have welcomed this development for bringing diverse musical forms to prominence in countries where they'd previously been overlooked, musicologist Su Zheng claims that the concept of world music homogenizes highly distinct traditions by reducing them all to a single category.

 

Which finding about mbaqanga and quan ho, if true, would most directly support Zheng's claim?

For centuries, the widespread acknowledgment of the involvement of the cerebellum—a dense brain structure in vertebrates—in coordinating motor control in humans has hindered recognition of other possible functions of the structure. Neuroscience research from the last two decades now suggests that the cerebellum regulates emotion and social behavior, and recent research by Ilaria Carta and colleagues has identified a pathway connecting the cerebellum to a center for motivation and reward processing known as the ventral tegmental area (VTA).

Which choice best states the main idea of the text?

The Clouds is a 423 BCE play by Aristophanes, originally written in ancient Greek. At the time, professional intellectuals called sophists taught customers rhetorical techniques to use in public speaking, along with providing instruction in other subjects. In the play, Aristophanes satirizes sophists as teaching people to speak dishonestly, as seen when the character_________.

 

Which choice most effectively uses a quotation from a translation of The Clouds to illustrate the claim?

Archaeologists and historians used to believe that the Maya civilization during its Classic period (roughly 250–900) lacked agricultural marketplaces. One reason for this belief was that these scholars misunderstood the ecology of the regions the Maya inhabited. Marketplaces typically emerge because different individuals or groups want to trade resources they control for resources they don't control. Scholars seriously underestimated the ecological diversity of the Maya landscape and thus assumed that ______.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Many contemporary Indigenous painters practice a specifically Indigenous mode of abstraction; for example, Dyani White Hawk assembles compositions out of motifs common in the beadwork and other traditional arts of her tribe. In contrast, the prominent Indigenous practitioners of abstract painting during the mid-twentieth century, such as the Luiseno artist Fritz Scholder, typically aligned their compositional strategies with Abstract Expressionism—a school of painting dominated by European American artists—instead of with traditionally nonrepresentational forms of Indigenous art. Thus, in the case of Scholder's generation, the identification of an abstract painting as Indigenous art tends to________.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

Paleoanthropologists have struggled to determine the onset of consistent clothing use by hominids. The appearance of hide-scraping tools by 780,000 years ago (780 Ka) enabled clothing production but does not entail it, and while clothing is thought to have been thermally superfluous for anatomically modern humans in their African range around their emergence by 300 Ka, it was essential for the persistence of humans outside Africa by 70 Ka. Melissa Toups et al. proposed a novel proxy: the evolution of the clothing-exclusive variant of the human-exclusive parasite Pediculus humanus (head lice), which Toups et al. date to as early as 170 Ka. This variant could not have emerged and survived without ample ecological niches, so if Toups et al. are correct, then___________.

Which choice most logically completes the text?

In 1977, legendary Puerto Rican performer Rita Moreno won an Emmy Award, making her one of the rare talents to earn the highest honors in television, music, film, and stage entertainment—the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony_______the achievement is known as "winning the EGOT."

 

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

In recent years, the English writer Matilda Betham (1776-1852), whose poetry 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 Elaine Bailey, whose work__________the richness of Betham'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?

In a 2022 study, Fa-Gang Wang et al. concluded that ocher artifacts excavated from an archaeological site in China date to between 39,000 and 41,000 years ago. The reliability of the dates that Wang et al. have posited, which were obtained through processes that determined when buried mineral grains surrounding the ocher artifacts were last exposed to sunlight,_________in part upon the researchers' exclusion of mineral grains that lacked adequate sun exposure before burial.

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

Conceptual artist Joan Jonas's first work, Wind (1968), is a silent film depicting people on a beach struggling to move about in extremely windy conditions. Wind has been recognized for bringing the principles of postmodern dance—which demystifies traditional choreography by foregrounding features of movement that ballet and other classical dance forms obscure (such as clumsiness, weightiness, resistance, and__________to video.

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

Dong Lai and Diego J. Muñoz's work on circumbinary disk accretion—a process in which, due to gravity, material from an orbiting disk spirals inward and accumulates onto two stars or black holes—relies heavily on simulations. Lai and Muñoz recognize the need for direct__________recommending evolving binary star systems as a promising avenue for future study.

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

In biology, many initially disordered systems will naturally move toward greater order according to the principle of self-organization, a conceptual framework for pattern___________biologists believe can be used to explain a range of organic phenomena, from population dynamics to the sociality of bees and ants.

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

Many historical accounts of the 1930s focus on the widespread movement of people from dust bowl-ravaged Great Plains states to faraway California. However, a 2016 study of 1940 census data complicates this popular narrative;_________researchers determined, migrants in states hardest hit by prolonged droughts and dust storms—Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas—merely relocated within the region.

Which choice completes the text with the most logical transition?

In a given rock formation, Tortonian rock from 11.6 million years ago might directly abut Capitanian rock from 264.3 million years ago. But how could this happen? Time did not actually stand still during the intervening 252.7 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?

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

· Haym ibn Risch was a fourteenth-century Majorcan cartographer of portolan charts.

· Francesco Pizigano was a fourteenth-century Venetian cartographer of portolan charts.

· Portolan charts were early nautical charts that mapped the waterways of the Mediterranean and Black Seas.

· Portolan charts in the Venetian tradition tended to be sparse in illustrations.

· Those in the Majorcan tradition tended to be richly illustrated.

· In Majorcan charts, the Atlas Mountains are depicted as a palm tree, and Bohemia is depicted as a horseshoe.

The student wants to make a distinction between the two portolan traditions. 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 a 2020 study, researchers in California investigated how many potential nesting sites female wood ducks visited during the nesting season.

· The researchers placed nest boxes throughout the survey area and tagged 138 female wood ducks with radio frequency ID trackers.

· These trackers recorded how many nest boxes each duck visited.

· 67 ducks (48.5%) visited only one nest box.

· 18 ducks (13.0%) visited 10 or more nest boxes.

· Younger ducks were more likely to visit multiple nest boxes.

The student wants to present the methods used in the 2020 study. 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.

· Brumaire is the second month in the calendar.

· The fifth day of Brumaire is named Oie, which means "goose."

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 C minor as expressing "longing."

· "Don't Speak"(1996) by No Doubt is a song written in C minor.

The student wants to explain how Schubart describes C minor. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?